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 I still haven't gotten a response from any of my previous letters, but that won't stop me from sending more. Nothing will stop me.

Someone please stop me.

Text version after the cut.

Ill-Advised Nuclear Testing, Part 1

Nuclear bombs: they’re pretty safe, right? Just make sure you’re standing behind the yellow line when they go off and you should be fine. Who drew the yellow line? Umm... some guy, I think. He had a clipboard and everything, so he must know what he’s doing.

It’s hard to do an article on the most ill-advised nuclear tests of all time, because it’s such a competitive area. You’d like to think that any nuclear testing would occur only after the most careful study and extensive cost-benefit analysis. In reality, however, most nuclear test programs seem to have their genesis with someone saying, “Hey, you know what look cool?”

The tradition of poorly thought out nuclear testing goes back almost to the beginning, in fact, when competing superiority and inferiority complexes in top military brass collided to make Operation Crossroads, also known as the Able-Baker tests. It all began in August 1945, the same month that atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, when the Navy and a United States Senator independently proposed that we drop a few nukes on warships.

The Navy wanted to do it so they could prove they still had relevance in the nuclear age. The Army Air Force, by way of their pet Senator, wanted to do it to prove the Navy’s irrelevance in the nuclear age. Both proposals were more or less rigged to produce the desired results.  The Air Force wanted to pack as many ships in as tight as possible with full loads of fuel and ammunition to assure maximum destruction, while the Navy wanted unarmed, unfueled ships spread over a wide area to show how survivable they were.

To understand these political machinations, you have to understand that the Air Force brass, drunk with power after killing something like a million civilians with nuclear and conventional weapons during WWII, were of the opinion that, eh, America didn’t really need a navy anymore. The Air Force’s shiny new nuclear weapons could do anything the Navy could, and better! Shit, I bet if you put floaties on a nuclear bomb, it could have landed troops at Normandy at least as well as the stupid Navy did.

The competing plans eventually compromised, crowding the ships into a small area but loading them with only small amounts of fuel and ammunition.  Scientists who’d worked on the Manhattan project, apparently oblivious to the critical need for the Air Force and the Navy to get into a dick-measuring contest, warned that the entire project was as dangerous as it was pointless. They were, of course, ignored. What the hell did they know about nuclear weapons, anyway?

Amateurs.

The preparations for the test were abysmal. Simulations were conducted using a stick of dynamite and model ships. Many of the test ships being moored at Bikini Atoll had unrepaired damage from the war, which would complicate any later damage analysis. And no pretesting of the effectiveness of planned decontamination techniques was made, so they really had no idea whether they’d be able to decontaminate surviving ships. The man in charge of the tests, Vice Admiral William Blandy, apparently didn’t even realize that ships might survive an atomic blast but still receive a fatal dose of radiation. When someone brought this up, he hastily added test animals to the target vessels. He also didn’t know that the Geiger counters used on site could not detect alpha radiation, and were therefore blind to plutonium contamination.

In short, the whole operation was fucked from the start.

Rare color photo of Admiral Blandy observing the Able-Baker tests.

Nevertheless, in June of 1946 the first bomb was readied for air drop aboard an Air Force B-29. It was armed with the infamous “demon core,” which had already taken the lives of two scientists in separate accidents during the Manhattan Project. In one last act of defiance, no doubt, the bomb missed its target by half a mile and landed well to the edge of the cluster of test ships, sinking only five of them.

Score one for the Navy.

You can find color footage of the Able test here.

Within a day of dropping the bomb, most of the surviving target ships had been boarded for inspection and decontamination. So, yeah, let’s take that point right back. However, in what I’m just going to assume was sheer luck, given the competence level of the people in charge, the Able bomb was air-burst high enough to avoid significant fallout. Most of its fission products dispersed into the atmosphere, where you’re still breathing them today.

News reporters brought in to witness the blast expressed disappointment that the bomb didn’t sink more ships, which just goes to show how quickly human beings get bored with even the most incredible events. This was only a year after the first detonation of an atomic weapon, and the A-bomb was already blasé.

Meh.

So fuck it, we’re putting the next one underwater. Won’t that look awesome?

For the Baker test, a nuclear bomb was suspended by cable from the ocean surface, so that it could detonate underneath the surviving target ships. This was a monumentally poor idea, because no one had a clue how this would affect the blast dynamics. Here’s a little preview, though: it wasn’t for the better.

When Baker went off, it lifted millions of tons of irradiated water and seabed material up to a mile in the air. When it inevitably came back down, this radioactive material expanded into a turbulent cloud of mist which spread outward, engulfing all of the test ships and bathing them in radioactivity. Since Baker was detonated below the surface, nearly all of the fission products and unfissioned plutonium settled into the local environment.

Baker Test. The shadow at the base of the water column is thought to be the battleship Arkansas 

being upended by the blast.

5000 people were sent into that radioactive environment to perform evaluation and decontamination. Fireboats tried to scour contamination off target ships with their hoses, but the process was largely ineffective—partly because they were trying to decontaminate with water pumped from the lagoon, which was now also radioactive. In many cases, this process only created more problems, when radioactive spray from the hoses blew back onto the fireboats and contaminated them too.

Video of the detonation and some of the fireboat cleanup efforts can be found here.

And if you think that’s dumb, you haven’t heard nothing yet, because sailors were actually sent aboard test ships to decontaminate them by hand. With soap and water. These sailors were given no protective equipment. They went to work in their uniforms, scrubbed plutonium-contaminated decks on their hands and knees, and then returned to their ships—dragging the contamination with them to spread it there.

Cleanliness is next to glowiness.

Even worse, the Navy was under the impression that target ships moored at the very edge of the test site could be recrewed and sailed home before being scrapped. Why in the holy hell would anyone want to occupy a ship that’s had an a-bomb dropped on it, and that’s just going to be scrapped anyway? Well, remember that dick-swinging contest between the Air Force and the Navy? The Navy wanted to take its surviving ships back to the mainland and get pictures of them steaming into port, to prove they were still operational after being hit by an atomic blast.

Two ships were thus reoccupied. Their crews promptly received a dangerous dose of radiation and had to be evacuated. The commander of the condemned battleship USS New York even got into a pissing match with the officer in charge of safety, Colonel Stafford Warren, and accused him of taking his Geiger counter readings too close to the deck of the ship. The deck where, you know, people have to walk, so wouldn’t it be a nice little bonus if it wasn't a cancer factory?

Speaking of things that aren't supposed to glow in the dark, guess what the fish in the lagoon started to do. Yup. They started to glow. Not in a visible wavelength, mind you, but let's just say that you could take an x-ray picture of them without actually using x-rays. Because, see, the fish were so radioactive that they now provided their own x-rays. Here's one of the blue tangs (a.k.a. surgeon fish) caught after the test, photographed in both x-ray and visible wavelengths:

At least it has a positive attitude.

The incredibly disturbing fish picture, along with data coming in from off-site tests for plutonium contamination—which were showing positive even when samples were taken deep inside the target ships—finally convinced Vice Admiral Blandy that he’d created a massive clusterfuck and ought to stop before things got even worse. The third detonation in the Crossroads operation was cancelled, all operations at Bikini Atoll were suspended, and most of the surviving test ships were sunk.

No one immediately died from the radioactive contamination of the Crossroads tests, though not for lack of effort on the Navy’s part. The mortality rate among veterans present at Bikini, however, has been higher than that for veterans generally, and 200 premature deaths may be attributable to the Able-Baker tests.

Oh yeah, and did I mention that people were living there? Yeah, Bikini was inhabited prior to the tests. It isn’t now, of course, what with the glow-in-the-dark fish and whatnot. The natives were evacuated to Rongerik Atoll, which then had to be evacuated after it too was contaminated by fallout from the botched Castle Bravo nuclear test in 1954.

So congratulations, Bikinians. You’re honorary nijū hibakusha! Hopefully that thought will help get you through your chemotherapy.

Fun With Broken Arrows

“Well, I, uh, don't think it's quite fair to condemn a whole program because of a single slip-up, sir.”
–General Buck Turgidson, Dr. Strangelove

Have you ever lost something important at work? An expensive tool, a critical spreadsheet, or maybe  an entire intern? You know that sinking feeling you get when you realize how badly you screwed up? Just imagine how much worse it would be, if that intern were made of plutonium.

The U.S. military classifies nuclear weapons incidents on a scale that starts small at “Dull Sword,” indicating an event which could have become a nuclear incident under different circumstances. For example, in 1950 the crew of a B-36 Peacemaker bomber that was experiencing engine trouble decided, before bailing out, to drop their Mark 4 nuclear bomb on Canada. Because fuck Canada, right? The bomb was only loaded with a practice nuclear core, however, which made a nuclear detonation impossible.

1950, in fact, witnessed a second Dull Sword event when a B-50 also experienced engine trouble and its crew also decided to drop their Mark 4 nuclear bomb on Canada. Yeah, by 1950 the United States Air Force had already dropped as many nuclear bombs on Canada as it had on Japan. And why the hell not? It’s nothing but snow, hockey, and socialized medicine up there. It’s practically Russia already.

Here you go, Canada. Have two of these on Uncle Sam.

Next in order of severity is a Bent Spear incident, which involves a relatively minor mistake or accident which has only the smallest probability of ending civilization. The most famous of these occurred in 2007 when a B-52 that was supposed to be ferrying unarmed cruise missiles for disposal was accidentally loaded with six live nuclear warheads, each one having a maximum yield of 150 kilotons. That’s a total explosive potential around 50 times larger than the “Little Boy” bomb that killed a hundred thousand people when dropped on Hiroshima. Breaking with tradition, these cruise missiles were not fired at Canada, but were instead delivered to Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana, where someone finally noticed they were live weapons. By then, a full two days had passed since they were improperly removed from their secure bunker. In that time, no one at the site of origin had noticed that six nuclear warheads were missing.

Next comes Empty Quiver, which is the theft, seizure, or other inadvertent loss of a nuclear weapon. Boooooring. Wake me up when we get to…

A Broken Arrow. These are the mack daddies of nuclear weapons incidents. A Broken Arrow is any incident in which there's a risk of detonation or release of fissile warhead material. Since the 1950’s, there have been approximately a gajillion of these incidents. Taken individually, most involved no or fairly low probabilities of accidental nuclear detonation, but put all of them together and it’s a fucking miracle that we haven’t accidentally vaporized a bunch of people.

The first Broken Arrow I’m aware of happened in 1950—a real banner year for nuclear mishaps—when a nuclear-armed B-29 crashed three minutes after takeoff. The nuclear core was aboard but not installed at the time of the crash, so the fissile plutonium merely cooked in the fire until they could put it out. No big.

Not to be outdone by the Americans, a Soviet submarine in 1977 accidentally dropped a nuclear missile into the northern Pacific Ocean. There was a build-up of pressure in the launch tube and they just, you know, accidentally dropped it overboard. Woops.

In fairness to the Soviets, the ocean floor is a popular place for accidentally leaving nuclear weapons. In 1965, the U.S. Navy dropped one off an aircraft carrier while steaming south of Japan. The bomb, the pilot, and the aircraft they were both attached to rolled off an elevator and were never recovered. The loss was not revealed, however, until 1981. Apparently, someone at the Pentagon feared that Japanese people might have strong opinions about nuclear weapons for some strange reason.

God, Japan, you’re such a Canada.

My absolute favorite broken arrow, however, has to be the 1961 crash of a B-52 in Goldsboro, North Carolina. The Air Force, having learned absolutely nothing from the shenanigans back in 1950, had armed the aircraft with two Mark 39 thermonuclear bombs—both live, with their plutonium cores fully installed. During a refueling operation off the coast, the tanker crew noticed a fuel leak on the B-52’s right wing. The pilots attempted to make an emergency landing, but the bomber began to break up at around 10,000 feet and the crew ejected, leaving the live bombs in their falling aircraft.

On one of the bombs, three of four safety mechanisms completely failed on the way down and the bomb armed itself for a ground burst. Following its programming to the letter, it deployed its drag chute to slow its descent, activated its detonation triggers, and charged its firing capacitors. When it hit the ground in a muddy field, the trigger mechanism activated, sending an electrical signal to the firing capacitors. If that signal had arrived, the capacitors would have discharged and the bomb would have detonated.

If it had gone off, according to calculations I made using Nukemap, the 3.8 megaton bomb would have created a crater five hundred feet deep. The fireball would have been a mile wide. It would have leveled every building for five miles in every direction. It would have inflicted third degree burns on 100% of exposed persons within twelve miles. The cloud of radioactive fallout would have stretched four hundred miles under moderate wind conditions, reaching as far as Atlanta or Philadelphia depending on wind speed and direction. Something like 20,000 people would have died.

Only an arm/safe switch—the single safety mechanism which worked properly on that bomb—stopped this from happening.

But, you protest, that arm/safe switch couldn’t possibly have malfunctioned, right? It’s surely failsafe, right? Right? RIGHT?! For fuck’s sake, Robyn, that last switch must have been very reliable!

Actually, now that you mention it, do you remember that there were two bombs? On the second bomb, the triggers did not activate, the capacitors did not charge, and the drag chute did not open. Many of its components were never found, but they did recover the arming switch—the same switch that, on the first bomb, was all that stood in the way of a nuclear detonation.

When found, the second bomb’s switch was set to the armed position.

Sleep tight, everyone.