22 January 2007

Snorkeling with Eels



In early 1946, America stood at the apex of military triumph even as its forces melted away. The Atomic Bomb had changed the world- that much was clear as day, though the rest was a little foggy.

What the Manhattan Project had delivered, though, was still not fully understood. The enterprise may have been the most expensive government program in history. The assembly lines at Oak Ridge, Tennessee (Site X) and Hanford (Site W) outside of Richland, Washington, continued to produce the materials for dozens more weapons. There had been no guarantee that the Japanese would call it quits, and plans for Operation CORONET, the invasion of Honshu Island south of Tokyo, included an annex to employ half a dozen atomic devices ahead of landing troops.

The explosions at Hiroshima and Nagasaki had been unmonitored, for operational reasons. The latter was the first successful detonation of the implosion-type device.

The swift conclusion of the Pacific War left vast amounts of material, and a significant, though melting, military force.

Lewis Strauss was one of the bureaucrats who would come to manage the US nuclear capability. He was an aide to Secretary of Navy James Forrestal, and later Chairman of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission. He had been enamored of the idea of using the Bomb against the Japanese bastion at Truk Atoll as early as 1944, but it was not ready for another year.

After the surrender, visionary Senator Brien McMahon (D-CT) made a speech to the Senate in which he advocated the use of an atomic bomb against the captured Japanese fleet. Eventually, it was decided to use obsolete US Navy ships, as well as captured Japanese and German ships.

On 10 January 1946, President Truman signed an order creating Task Force ONE, with a mission statement directing it to test the effects of the newest versions of the atomic bomb.

Commanding TF-1 was Vice Admiral W.  H. P. Blandy, who was assigned two hundred ships, forty-two thousand men fifty thousand men and one hundred and fifty aircraft.

That is where LCDR Ed Gillfillen and the crew of the ex-IJN battleship Nagato come in.

Three tests were envisioned. Test ABLE would be an air-dropped weapon delivered against a target fleet anchored in the lagoon at Bikini Atoll in the northern Marianas island. Tests BAKER and CHARLIE would be underwater detonations, the first at a depth of ninety feet, and the second at a much deeper depth.

Ed arrived with Natago in the lagoon at Bikini in late April of 1946. Preparations for the test were well underway, but had little to do for the crew, and maintenance on a ship that was not going to go anywhere was not required. He spent most of his days snorkeling, and found a coral head the rose to only a foot below the surface of the lagoon.

He would have the work boat drop him off in the morning when it was on the way in, and swim for a few hours until it returned to pick him up.

He shared his paradise with a moray eel. Ed never saw the whole snake, but said that “his neck was the size of my upper thigh. I had a harpoon and probably could have taken him in a fight, but though he watched me carefully, gulping in a meditative way, he never made a move to attack.”

ABLE was detonated on the first of July. Nagato got through the explosion with only minor damage, and Ed and the crew moved right back in, spending the next three weeks in the mildly-radioactive hull, and continuing to snorkel with the eel at his coral head.

Test BAKER was something completely different. The official report goes like this:

"Bomb B detonated 90 ft beneath the surface of Bikini Lagoon at 59.7 sec after 0834 (local time) on 25 July 1946. . . The amount of energy released was normal for an atomic bomb of the Nagasaki type; a total of 8.5 x 10 20 ergs of energy was released, which is equivalent to the total amount of energy released in the exploding of 20.3 kilotons of TNT."6 The surface temperature was 300 C, the pressure 1011.8 millibars, and the relative humidity 73%. The wind was 7 knots from 135 deg. (true).

Plutonium contamination of target vessels was sufficiently great to  constitute a serious danger to persons boarding the target vessels days, weeks, or even  months after B-Day . . . Decontamination efforts met with varying success. Earliest  efforts (involving washing away loose materials) reduced the radioactivity by a factor of  2 to 5; but subsequent efforts produced smaller improvement."

The difference between the air-burst and the one in the water was profound.

The crater produced in the Lagoon bottom was 25 ft deep; the net amount of bottom material moved was over 2,000,000 cubic yards of organic and inorganic matter.

Nagato was so hot that it could not be reboarded, and though she was afloat, there was compromise to her hull which could not be repaired due to the radiation. Navy divers placed charges against her hull to balance the flooding, but it was to no avail. The battleship continued to settle, and after a few days, Ed says the Last Battleship “finally lifted her bow high in the air and slid backward into the lagoon.”

The contamination from the radioactive sand and coral that lay on the ships and shore was pervasive. Even conducting the contamination operations caused more contamination. Even so, preparations for Test CHARLIE continued, though it was apparent that things were not going to be right. By 10 August the teams of specialists were carrying out detailed examinations and salvage work.

President Truman cancelled the test on 7 Sept. 1946, and the Joint Task Force ceased operations determined that the radiological contamination was severe enough to decommission all vessels that could not be manned again, and place them in caretaker status at Kwajalein.

The move was accomplished during the remainder of August and September. A major task at Kwajalein was to offload ammunition stored aboard the target ships. Personnel continued to work on target ships at Kwajalein into 1947.

There were hundreds of scientists among the military personnel. One was the father of a friend of mine. He told me that his Dad was one of the civilian scientists on the University or Rochester team responsible for radiation safety and survey at Test Baker (under the oversight of Dr. Stafford Warren).  After Test Able, he boarded and instrumented the Nagato (and other vessels, including the Prinz Eugen, which he described as a very modern, beautiful fighting ship).

He climbed to the top of the Nagato's superstructure/mast and setup sensors and experiments in several places on the vessel (tried to remove the huge, ornate steam gauges from the engine room, but had to settle for a bridge telephone).

He told me the below decks were small and tight -- a foot or so less from deck to overhead than found in US vessels. Some places they were squished down rather low by the blast (the main deck/armored deck had been deformed by the overpressure/shock wave).

After the underwater test, this ship and most others was far too hot to board again (highly radioactive coral fragments and lagoon bottom had been brought up by the blast and distributed on the vessels). They could see significant damage topside.

They stood down for three days, and in the meantime he went diving at the far end of the atoll with the biologists collecting small fish and other species. Due to some gross error in forecasting the deposition of the fallout, he and the rest of the group all returned with significant radiation exposure (they wore tennis shoes for walking on the reef, accumulated sand in them that turned out to be hot as hell -- since they had no film badges or counters, no good estimate could be made of their exposure -- he was consigned to the USS Haven for two weeks).

Some 26 years later he was diagnosed with Multiple Myeloma. This was the same period reported by the residents of St. George, Utah. Their symptoms and diagnosis all clustered around the 26 to 27 year timeframe, after exposure to fallout from the above ground test fallout from Nevada. He went on for four years after that, passing away the day after Christmas in 1973.”

1973 would have been about the year that the XO died as well. I can only imagine the consequences of the million solders and Marines that would have waded ashore 48 hours after the bombing on Honshu with another 8-12 weapons.

CROSSROADS was the last public demonstration of the power of the nuke; thereafter they would be observable but closed military experiments. Altogether, 23 separate tests were conducted at Bikini between 1946 and 1958, including the memorable 1954 test that introduced the Hydrogen Bomb to the world. Thereafter, the problems of fallout between the Russian, American and Chinese testing programs began to show up in the milk we drank at school.

The contaminant was called Strontium-190, as I recall, and we were all quite alarmed. Atmospheric testing went out of fashion, and all subsequent tests were conducted underground at the Nevada Test Site.

I had a chance to visit the NTS once as a hanger-on for a Congressional StaffDel that had some uneasy questions about the proposed storage site at Yucca Mountain. We were taken for a tour of the area, which included the SEDAN crater (last aboveground test that they still talk about in Las Vegas and St. George) and walked down the instrumentation tunnel to the 10-ton blast door that sealed the explosion of the last US underground test. It was known for some reason as "Hunter's Rest."

As a former nuclear planner and command-and-control weenie, naturally I was interested. And amazed.

Our tour into a lost world of hard-rock miners and weapons testers was quite unique, since the Army guys that did that were all being reassigned with only a rump staff remaining, in case the Clinton's changed the policy.

We got back to the hotel to hear the news about the Muslim attack on the Murrah Building in Oklahoma City. One of the Army experts explained to me how a fuel-fertilizer bomb worked. He said it was really powerful, and sometimes they used versions to simulate nuclear explosions.

I heard the corrections, later, too, but they just as well might have skipped them.

A bridge from the past to the future. A crossroads, of a sort.

Copyright 2007 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com


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