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!