"The world's greatest achievements often happen on the edge of chaos" - Unknown.

Sort of like "Necessity is the mother of invention"?
As it turns out, no.
It's about good old radiation and uranium and government experiments - the Manhattan Project resulting in serious accidents that killed 4 scientists and critically injured others.

Manhattan Project: The Philadelphia Experiment : On September 2, 1944, a group of engineers, some civilian, some military, were working on an experimental facility at the Philadelphia Navy Yard when, without warning, it exploded. Peter Bragg and Douglas Meigs, both civilian engineers assigned to the Manhattan Project, were killed; five others were critically injured

In August of 1945 and again, in May 1946, two Los Alamos scientists were exposed to lethal doses of radiation while performing experiments to determine critical mass. These experiments, performed at the Omega Site, Los Alamos, were commonly referred to as "Tickling the Tail of the Dragon". Although several months apart, both accidents occurred on a Tuesday and both on the 21st of the month...and, both men died in the same hospital room at the U.S. Engineers Hospital at Los Alamos: Harry K. Daghlian, Jr. (Dolly-an) 1921 - 1945 and Louis P. Slotin 1910 - 1946

Slotin's death ended all hands-on critical assembly work at Los Alamos. We immediately started work on a remote control system with the critical assembly equipment and the operating crew separated by roughly a quarter mile. We had no more criticality deaths or injuries. Tributes, of all sorts, came in following Slotin's death

Broken hearted

On Oct. 1, 1980 the Enewetak people returned to their atoll to find devastation. Half of the atoll was uninhabitable due to radioactive contamination. The island of Runit was a dumping ground for radioactive waste. The main island of Enjebi was too contaminated for the Enewetakese to resettle there. The native foods, integral not only to their diet, but to their culture and way of life, were either gone or too contaminated to eat. Where once was lush vegetation, banana trees and coconut palms, now was barren land. For hundreds of years copra - the meat of the coconut and source of coconut oil - had been a valuable trading commodity, with the Spanish in the 1600's, subsequently with the Germans, then with the Japanese.
Without the ecosystem that created and supported their lifestyle, the Enewetak people became dependent on imported food and developed health problems such as diabetes and heart disease. They no longer had the vegetation that had enabled them to produce canoes and matting, that gave meaning and activity to their daily lives.
Their beloved atoll, the heart of the people, was "broken".

"I love the way my atoll is, there where I was born"

In order for the United States to use the tiny Enewetak Atoll for its bomb testing, it had to relocate the native inhabitants. Their own memory of their people is rooted at Enewetak, the island was their home, their heart, their culture, their family. Their small society lived in peaceful isolation, each family group with its own piece of land that was passed down from generation to generation. The Enewetakese were the island and the island was them.

Chief Johannes will never forget the day in 1947 when the American Navy ship came to take them away: A man told us: "You cannot protest or fight. You are like the rabbit fish wriggling on the end of a spear. You can struggle all you want, but there's nothing you can do to change this."
From their exile on the island of Ujelang, the Enewetakans witnessed the detonation of Ivy Mike: Chief Johannes remembers the day vividly. "We were told to look in the direction of Enewetak. Those of us who did will never forget what they saw. First, a bright flash rising up from the water; then it appeared as though the sea had caught fire. A great, huge fire rose up into the sky and a noise was heard that was louder than any thunder.. . .What we saw caused us to worry about what was happening on our atoll, but we were told that we could not go there to see. Instead, we continued to wait."

They would wait thirty years to go home.

A Bomb by any other name......is still a bomb

Nectar, at 1.69 megatons, was a baby compared to most of the other hydrogen bombs when it was fired in the Enewetak Atoll on May 14, 1954 - the last one in the series known as Operation CASTLE. By contrast, "The Bravo event" of February 28, 1954, in the Bikini Atoll, was 15 megatons. They miscalculated the yield on this bomb which used enriched Lithium-6** and it turned out to be about two and a half times more than expected. Bravo was "the single worst incident of fallout exposure in all of the U.S. atmospheric testing program, scattered over more than 5,000 square miles of ocean and islands, resulting in the contamination and exposure of military and civilian U.S. personnel working on the shot, and people of the islands who were earlier moved to a supposedly "safe" island but received large amounts of radiation. Acute radiation effects were observed among some of these people." (from the Internet Archive.)


**The United States produced a total of 442.4 metric tons of enriched lithium from 1954 to 1963 for thermonuclear weapons, tritium production, and other purposes.

In the 1980's and 1990's some of the paperwork from the cold war was declassified: old films, letters, memos, reports. A lot of it is boring, and a lot of it feels like only part of the story - something's missing.....hmmm, guess that's what they mean by "sanitized" - a word the government uses quite often about these records.

I keep reminding myself that military and government documents use their own language, which if you try to analyze out of context can be misleading. I was the daughter of a career Navy man, so I understand that, but sometimes when I read these reports on the native islanders of the Bikini and Enewetak Atolls I feel a little sick.

On the lighter side

Besides the H-bomb, pestilence, strife, political upheaval, and natural disasters, there were also some good (or at least interesting) things that happened in 1952, such as:

The Treaty of San Francisco formally ended the occupation of Japan.
The first open-heart surgery was performed at the University of Minnesota.
UFOs over Washington D.C. were tracked on radar.
The Mousetrap by Agatha Christie opened in London.
Ann Davison became the first woman to sail the Atlantic Ocean.
I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus recorded by 12-year-old Jimmy Boyd was released (it sold 3 million records.)
Christine Jorgensen had the first successful sexual reassignment operation.
Emmett Ashford became the first black umpire in organized baseball.
President Truman announced he would not seek reelection.
The Diary of Anne Frank was published.
Mount Sinai Hospital in Ohio was the site of the first successful surgical separation of Siamese (conjoined) twins.
Albert Schweitzer won the Nobel Peace Prize. "Until he extends his circle of compassion to include all living things, man will not himself find peace."

You gotta love Wikipedia!

Don't call them bombs

The first Hydrogen device fired, in 1952, was called "Mike", part of Operaton Ivy, and it completely vaporized the island of Elugelab in the Enewetak Atoll. First there was an island, then there was a crater where the island used to be. The excited message sent to Eisenhower was "The island of Elugelab is missing!" Oh goody!

This was a great triumph for the scientists and military personnel at the time, because it was the first test of the Teller-Ulam design which combined a fission trigger with the cryogenic deuterium–tritium fusion fuel, and proved that it could be done. Plutonium was the ignitor and combined with Uranium to provide the radiation, which made enough heat to set off the fusion bomb. A cryogenics plant was built on Parry Island in the Enewetak Atoll to make the hydrogen fuel "package".

The government called the bombs "shots" or "tests" and, unbelievably, they gave them all names, like Mike, George, Bravo, Romeo, Nectar, and others.

I read one serviceman's account of this time talking about how they would gather on the beach to watch the test - this was history in the making and the mushroom cloud produced from the blast was awe-inspiring in its power and beauty; they were told to turn their backs, close their eyes, draw up their knees, fold their arms over their knees, and put their heads on their arms. (does this sound familiar to anyone?). After the blast they could then turn around to see the mushroom cloud.

Looking back at it now, it seems impossibly naive that they never considered that the effects of radiation would not be deterred by simply turning their backs and closing their eyes.

Blast from the Past

One day my cousin Deena Sue called me - I hadn't spoken to her in probably 25 years. She wanted to tell me about a program set up by Congress to provide reparation to employees or their descendants of a company called Holmes & Narver. This company had a government contract in the Pacific Proving Ground for the Atomic Energy Commission's testing of hydrogen bombs in the fifties. My grandfather, a refrigeration expert, was an independent contractor hired by Holmes & Narver, along with many other civilians, to provide various services on the Marshall Islands for the military and scientific communities working on these thermonuclear devices.

I have always remembered the name of the island he lived and worked on because it was an unusual and, to me, beautiful name: Enewetak - pronounced "an-a-wee-tock". I never knew about the bomb testing, I just remember him talking about how beautiful and how terribly hot it was - and how well paid he was. My mother had a photograph of him on the beach in nothing but shorts and zories, wearing a baseball cap and aviator sunglasses. This all occurred before I was born, I was a kid listening to his memories about what sounded like a paradisiacal time and place.

Now my cousin was telling me that all those men, along with the native islanders, were exposed to ionizing radiation....which caused - you guessed it - cancer.
So, being the curious person I am I started researching this cold war phenomenon of developing thermonuclear devices in a race to beat the Russians to a deliverable (could be dropped from a plane) bomb.

Stay tuned for more!

Tools for Blogging

"One critical consideration when launching a blog is what you are going to call it."--Chris Garrett

First of all, I love quotes. Second of all, I love titles: if I ever write the poems, stories, books for which I have titles, I'll be too busy to write this blog.

So the naming was important. Since I am a huge fan of the defunct SciFi tv show "Firefly", I chose one of my favorite lines by a character in that show. "I am a leaf on the wind, watch how I soar," or close enough for rock and roll.

Testing, one two three....

Okay, here's my test blog, to see if I could do it, how easy or hard it would be, if I liked the result, and so on.
Answers, in order:
obviously, since it's here; easier than I thought, harder than it looks; yes!