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Special Feature

Learning the Wrong Lessons from Hiroshima:
US Nuclear Testing in 1946
Robert Jacobs
Professor, Hiroshima Peace Institute, Hiroshima City University
When the United States conducted two nuclear attacks against civilian targets and primarily
civilian populations in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 the world was collectively
shocked. While the scale of the destruction was not new, tens and even a hundred thousand
civilians had been killed in single air raids early in World War Two, the new weapon used
to conduct the attacks was still shocking. Single bombs that could kill tens of thousandsof people indiscriminately in a second and set cities instantly ablaze was horrifying. As
the world learned about the nature of the weapons, and the use of radiation as a military
tool for killing, horror at the attacks grew. This revulsion was supposedly true even for the
US President Harry Truman, who had ordered the nuclear attacks. According to the diaryof Henry Wallace, Truman’s Commerce Secretary, Truman told a cabinet meeting on 10
August 1945 that he had halted a third nuclear attack on Japan because “the thought of wiping out another 100,000 people was too horrible. He didn’t like the idea of killing ‘all thosekids.’”1
I have described how there was a primary narrative about nuclear weapons that emerged in
the West during the first weeks and months of the Atomic Age: nuclear weapons were so
destructive that humankind was now faced with a choice between eliminating major wars,
or destroying civilization with nuclear weapons. This fundamental “fork in the road” narrative was advanced in 1945 by American religious, military, political and social leaders.
“Mankind stands at a crossroads of destiny,” wrote former Major George Fielding Eliot in
the New York Herald Tribune just a few weeks after the attacks, “The decisions which now
confront the mind of man are the most important in his history. Upon these decisions hangs
his continued existence on this planet.”2 Human beings in many countries were anxious
about what nuclear weapons might portend for the future of human civilization. People atthat time had seen two world wars and a global depression in their own lifetimes. It was
natural to image yet another world war̶World War Three, that would be fought with
nuclear weapons̶looming just ahead.

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Into this anxious world came news that the United States would be detonating more nuclear
weapons in the summer of 1946. Three nuclear tests were to be conducted at the US TrustTerritory of the Marshall Islands. These tests, the ﬁrst of over 2,000 nuclear tests that would
follow the two nuclear attacks of 1945, would set a course for nuclear weaponry, and for
preparations for nuclear war that would deﬁne the coming Cold War era. Rather than learn
the lessons that ﬁlled people worldwide with anxiety about nuclear explosions, the UnitedStates would now embrace them as fundamental to American security, domination andidentity. Standing after Hiroshima at that fork in the road, the United States charted a dedicated path towards further destruction.
The two nuclear tests at Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands in 1946 were named Operation
Crossroads and were carried out by a cross-service military command named Joint Task
Force One. These tests have been analyzed primarily for their role establishing protocols
for postwar nuclear weapon testing in terms of colonial or postcolonial test siting, therelationship between the nuclear weapon laboratories and the military, and their legacy
in Marshallese society.3 This article will examine the degree to which we can understandOperation Crossroads as an extension of the military actions in Hiroshima and Nagasaki
rather than in their role as foundational events in the history of Cold War nuclear weapon
testing.
The Manhattan ProjectIn 1938, the process of nuclear fission was discovered accidentally in the laboratory of
Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry in Berlin,
Germany.4 At ﬁrst, they were uncertain why the chemical experiments they were runningwere producing excess energy for which they could not account. Over the subsequentweeks, physicists Lise Meitner and Otto Frisch deduced that the basis of this excess energy
was that some of the uranium that they were working with had experienced nuclear ﬁssion.5
Nuclear ﬁssion had been theorized, but never observed before in the real world.
Nuclear fission is the process by which a neutron splits the nucleus of an atom of uranium-235 (after its invention in 1940, plutonium was also found to be able to ﬁssion). The
nucleus of atoms is held together by one of the four fundamental forces of the universe,
known as the “strong force.”6 When the nucleus is split, the energy of the strong force holding it together is released. This is nuclear energy. It can be used in a sustained chain reaction to produce energy, or in a rapid chain reaction that releases energy in an explosion. The

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amount of energy in the strong force that holds together the nucleus of one atom is not very
substantial, but physicists were aware from time news of this discovery spread throughout
the global scientiﬁc community in 1938 that it might well be possible to assemble suﬃcientamounts of a ﬁssile material and release the strong force holding together the nuclei of trillions and trillions of atoms in a single second. This was the idea of a nuclear weapon.7
News of the ﬁssioning of uranium spread around the scientiﬁc world within weeks of theexperiment in Berlin. In the summer of 1939, expat Hungarian physicists Leo Szilard andEugene Wigner drafted a letter advising the United States government about the possibility of using uranium in an atomic bomb and had the letter signed by their friend Albert
Einstein and then delivered to the White House.8 Over the next two years the United States
government provided the seed money and infrastructure that would formally grow by 1941
into the Manhattan Engineering District, or Manhattan Project as it is popularly known.
The Manhattan Project was largely successful because of its virtual limitless access to US
federal funding and resources during wartime. Under the umbrella of the project entire cities were purpose built̶Oak Ridge, Tennessee to manufacture highly-enriched uranium;
Hanford, Washington to manufacture plutonium; Los Alamos, New Mexico as a laboratory
and bomb assembly facility̶and a vast network of support facilities that were erectedfrom coast to coast.9 The elite physical and chemical scientists of the United States, theUnited Kingdom, and many refugee scientist who had ﬂed Nazi controlled areas, assembled
in Los Alamos to design the weapon, while the production facilities at Oak Ridge alone
used twice the electrical consumption of New York City.10 Hundreds of thousands of workers were employed at various Manhattan Project sites. This heavy investment in science,engineering and manufacturing, and the commitment of such a large labor force, were
essential to the project’s successful production of both nuclear power plants and nuclear
weapons in less than ﬁve years.
The nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki
Early in 1945 the United States was successfully manufacturing small amounts of highlyenriched uranium at Oak Ridge, and plutonium in the reactors at Hanford. These materials
were transferred to Los Alamos where they were used in experiments, and ultimately in theconstruction of nuclear weapons. Two diﬀerent designs were used in building the weapons,each with a diﬀerent process to solve the problem of assembling a critical mass of the ﬁssile
materials at the moment of detonation, but keeping them dispersed beforehand. The gun

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広島平和研究：Hiroshima Peace Research Journal, Volume 9design was built with the uranium from Oak Ridge, and the implosion design was built utilizing the plutonium from Hanford.11 After the war only the US would not manufacture gundesign nuclear weapons again, but only implosion weapons, in part because it was cheaper
to manufacture plutonium than to enrich uranium.
Manhattan Project scientists were confident in the gun design and felt no need to test it,
however there was sufficient uncertainty about the implosion design that it was tested
before the nuclear attacks on Japan. The Trinity test, the first detonation of a nuclear
weapon on Earth, was conducted several hundred kilometers south of Los Alamos in southcentral New Mexico on 16 July 1945.12 After this successful test, unassembled weapons
were transported by the US Army to a forward base on Tinian, an island in the Northern
Marianas in the Paciﬁc Ocean that the US had liberated from Japan in 1944. On Tinian the
US Army had built the largest airbase of the war which was used continually in the aerial
attacks against the Japanese military and Japan itself. Members of the 509th Composite
Group of the US Army Air Forces, who had been training to conduct nuclear attacks forseveral years, were forward positioned to Tinian.13
On 6 August members of the 509 Composite Group departed Tinian in the Enola Gay B-29
Superfortress with the gun design weapon, nicknamed “Little Boy,” and ﬂew to Hiroshima.
At 8:15 in the morning they conducted a nuclear attack on the city of Hiroshima resulting
in the deaths of around 100,000 human beings, and the injury of tens of thousands. Threedays later, on 9 August, members flew the B-29 named Bockscar carrying the implosion
weapon, nicknamed “Fat Man,” and at 11:02 conducted a nuclear attack on the city ofNagasaki, killing a little less than 100,000 people and wounding tens of thousands more.14
The devastation in Hiroshima and Nagasaki cannot be overstated. Large sections of bothtowns were disintegrated in less than a second, and ﬁres burned out areas that were not ﬂattened by the blast wave. Tens of thousands were killed instantly and tens of thousands morewounded so severely by the blast and heat that they died over the next few hours or days of
their injuries and burns. The burst of prompt gamma radiation penetrated through buildings
and human bodies at deadly or harmful levels out to 3km, weakening as it traveled beyond
that distance. Radiation levels were lethal to those exposed without shielding to over 1km
and remained harmful even to those indoors extending further out. Many who received highdoses of external radiation died on the day of the attacks, while many more became sickand died over the coming months from illness and organ failure.

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Prior to the two nuclear attacks, the number of people who were understood to have been
exposed to significant levels of radiation numbered in the hundreds (many more were
exposed at uranium mines, but their exposures were yet to be studied, treated, or evenacknowledged).15 This resulted in a lack of clarity about how the exposures in Hiroshima
and Nagasaki would aﬀect those who did not succumb quickly. Many would develop cancers and other illnesses resulting in early morbidity over the coming years and decades,
typiﬁed by the death of 12-year-old Sadako Sasaki (often the single human being in either
Hiroshima or Nagasaki who can be named by Americans) from leukemia ten years after
having been exposed to radiation at the age of two.
More people were exposed to radiation from radioactive fallout, which remained at thesite and spread downwind from the attack locations. People who entered the cities to ﬁnd
loved ones or to help the community after the attacks also began to become sick fromradiation exposures, as did those who lived where the fallout clouds deposited particles.
In Hiroshima the fallout came down with rain that also carried soot from the ﬁres, leading
to it being called “black rain.” Recent court rulings have expanded the number of people
exposed to black rain who are legally entitled to oﬃcial status and compensation as hibakusha.16
The bomb was always intended as a shock weapon: its use in Japan was intended to compel
surrender through fear, not through the loss of essential personnel or facilities. In his seminal article justifying the nuclear attacks on Japan, Henry Stimson, the wartime US Secretaryof War explained that, “I felt that to extract a genuine surrender from the Emperor and his
military advisers, they must be administered with a tremendous shock.”17 The destruction
wrought in Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not greater than that being inflicted on dozens
of Japanese towns by ﬁre bombings weekly since March 1945. The impossibility of guarding against a single plane getting through and releasing a single bomb achieving the scaleof loss that took hundreds of B-29s hours when using napalm weapons was intended toconfront Japanese military leaders, and the Emperor, with an inability to conceive of a way
forward besides surrender. The nuclear attacks were not conducted for their military utility
but for their capacity at psychological destabilization.
Nuclear imaginaries of 1945/46
The United States entered the postwar world in a power position. The only combatant
whose cities and industrial capacity were undamaged, it was also the only nation in pos-

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広島平和研究：Hiroshima Peace Research Journal, Volume 9session of nuclear weapons. A third weapon being prepared for use in Japan was held backand became the ﬁrst in America’s postwar nuclear stockpile. Not only was the US the sole
nuclear weapon state in the late 1940s, it was also the only nation in a position to study
both nuclear weaponry and the health eﬀects of radiation exposures.
Early work by numerous US agencies to quantify and study both mortality from the attacks,
and also the ongoing health effects of radiation exposures led to the formation of theAtomic Bomb Casualty Commission (ABCC) in both Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1946.18
This agency would study the health impacts of radiation on the hibakusha, and would
ultimately build a database to correlate radiation exposures to subsequent health effects.
The US imagined that such data would be useful in protecting American troops on atomic
battleﬁelds in the future, at protecting Americans during nuclear attacks on the homeland,
and also in calculating how best to harm enemy soldiers and civilians.19
The ABCC would only quantify and study the short-lived external radiation experienced in
the burst of the weapon and not consider the health impacts of those exposed to internalizedradioactive particles from the fallout. It was imagined that in the future there was likely tobe subsequent usage of nuclear weapons in war, and therefore radiation exposures would be
more likely to resemble the exposures of those living near to the detonation in Hiroshima
than those living where the black rain fell. However, while there never was a nuclear war
with the direct use of weapons against an enemy during the Cold War, over 2,000 nuclear
weapons would be detonated in “tests,” exposing millions of people to radioactive fallout
worldwide.20
As the sole nuclear weapon state in the immediate postwar world, the United States understood itself as holding unrivaled military power and being in a position to exert its political will globally. While the Soviet Union had played a greater role in the defeat of Nazi
Germany, and had a larger standing army, the new weapons placed the United States in asuperior military position. Although the United States understood that Japan had been a
defeated nation before the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it also believed that its useof the nuclear weapons compelled Japanese surrender. For American military strategists
and political leaders, nuclear weapons appeared to be militarily useful weapons, and they
imagined that their sole possession of them would translate into political dominance in the
postwar world.21
Towards that imaginary, the United States military worked to more fully understand theLearning the Wrong Lessons from Hiroshima: US Nuclear Testing in 1946

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capacities of nuclear weapons, to enhance their power, and to make them more aﬀordable
to manufacture. Work began immediately after the surrender of Japan to further develop
and improve nuclear weapons, and also to generate data about their effects on militaryand civilian targets.22 This was to be accomplished through a program of nuclear weapon
testing, and thus began a weapon testing program that would endure beyond the end of
the nascent Cold War, and eventually see the US itself detonate more than 1,000 nuclear
weapons in total.
Planning Operation Crossroads
The US began the postwar testing of nuclear weapons less than a year after the attack
on Hiroshima during Operation Crossroads at Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands in thesummer of 1946. These first tests of the postwar era began, in part, as a reflection of the
war that had just ended. On 14 September 1945, Lieutenant General B. M. Giles in theTokyo headquarters of the US Army suggested that an atomic bomb be used to destroy
and sink what remained of the Japanese naval ﬂeet, to render the ships useless. Commenting on behalf of the US Navy one month later, Admiral Ernest King replied that the Navy
advocated expanding the operation so that it could also focus on determining the effectsof nuclear explosions on naval vessels. Having experienced a massive loss in the surprise
attack on Pearl Harbor in 1942, Navy leaders were keen to understand how to protect ships
from atomic attack, and how far apart ships should be when deployed to limit the destruction of a ﬂeet at sea.23 They also hoped to demonstrate that nuclear weapons did not maketraditional naval vessels obsolete.
A Joint Task Force combining units from both the US Army and Navy was formed to planand conduct three nuclear tests to study the effects of the nuclear weapons on ships andother materials. The ships would include a variety of warships and merchant vessels todetermine the impacts on diﬀerent vessels at various distances. Joint Task Force One wasformally authorized in January 1946 and planning began in earnest for the three tests.
The location chosen for the tests was Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands in the mid-Paciﬁc.
The US had occupied the Marshalls since defeating the Japanese there in early 1944; theJapanese had taken over occupation of the islands from the Germans at the beginning ofWorld War One, and the Germans had taken colonial possession of them centuries earlier
from the Spanish.24 While the US had conducted its ﬁrst nuclear test in New Mexico in July
1945, fallout from the test had crossed the nation to the Eastern seaboard and had deposited

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広島平和研究：Hiroshima Peace Research Journal, Volume 9in various locations including on the Illinois/Indiana border thousands of miles from thedetonation.25 Awareness of the threat of radioactive fallout to the well-being of American
citizens, the US chose to test the three weapons outside of the continental United States. In
January of 1946, the U.S. Navy announced that Bikini Atoll was chosen, a site that “mayaccurately be described as one of the most remote places of the earth.”26
Bikini Atoll was actually home to 186 people, whose families had lived on the atoll for
centuries. To use the atoll for nuclear testing, the entire population had to be evacuatedand resettled on another atoll or island. In March 1946, the 167 Bikinians currently living
there were displaced from their homes so that the atoll could transition into a nuclear testsite.27 Over the next decades the Bikinians would be moved multiple times before settlingthemselves primarily over 800km away in the southern Marshall Islands.28
The Joint Task Force began to make preparations for the nuclear tests scheduled to begin in
the summer of 1946. 96 naval ships from multiple countries were either navigated or towed
to Bikini Atoll to be placed in the lagoon as target vessels for the tests. These were primarily US ships but also included some Japanese and German vessels. The target ﬂeet included
aircraft carriers, destroyers, battleships, submarines, and smaller vessels. The support ﬂeet
used by Task Force personnel to stage, maintain, examine and later eﬀorts to salvage anddecontaminate the target fleet included 146 naval ships and 156 military aircraft. Other
equipment brought to the site included, 4 television transmitters and 750 cameras.29 Since
the whole world was interested in and worried about nuclear weapons, the Crossroads tests
were intended to be intensely documented. With only low-quality images available of themushroom clouds rising out of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the mushroom clouds of Bikini
would be photographed and filmed from multiple angles, and reproduced in newspapers
globally.
To staﬀ the support vessels, stage experiments and manage the weapons and measurementsof their effects, 42,000 US military personnel would participate in Operation Crossroads
by the mid-summer. This was in addition to the scientific staff from Los Alamos, eight
congressmen, and media professionals there to cover and promote the events. The tests
were to be broadcast live on radio stations heard in many countries around the world. To
stand in for human beings and experience the explosions directly would be “204 goats, 200
pigs, 5000 rats” all placed in cages or pens on the target ﬂeet for the ﬁrst test, more would
be placed on the target ﬂeet for the second test. There was a scientiﬁc and medical basis forchoosing these stand-ins for humans: “Pigs were particularly valuable since their skin andLearning the Wrong Lessons from Hiroshima: US Nuclear Testing in 1946

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short hair are comparable to man’s. Goats were useful because their weight is comparable
to man’s and the quantity of their body fluid is sufficient for extensive laboratory analysis. Rats, time-honored experimental animals of radiology, were a logical choice since somuch is known about their response to radiation and the correlation of their responses withman’s.”30
The first test, Able, was to replicate the two attacks on Japan, with a weapon dropped byan airplane over the lagoon of Bikini and detonated at a similar altitude. The second test,
Baker, would see a weapon detonated underwater amidst the target ﬂeet in the lagoon. The
third test, scheduled for 1947 and named Charlie, planned on a weapon being detonateddeep underwater outside of the lagoon and some distance away from Bikini.
The Operation Crossroads tests
Test Able took place on the morning of 1 July 1946 (local time), with an airdropped implosion weapon detonated slightly lower than the Hiroshima explosion and yielding approximately 23kt. Five vessels sunk as a result of the effects of the detonation, but many more
were badly damaged and experienced ﬁres.31 Support vessels began to enter the lagoon twohours after the test, led by radiation monitor crews, but ultimately bringing thousands ofservice personnel in salvage crews. They spread out throughout the lagoon to determine
the conditions and radioactivity of the ships, whether they were operable, and whether they
could be decontaminated. They also checked on the condition of the thousands of animals
that had endured the weapon’s eﬀects directly on their bodies. Test personnel determinedthat 35% of the animals that experienced the Able explosion were dead by the end of September 1946.32
Test Baker took place on the morning of 25 July 1946, about 27 meters beneath the surfaceof the water, and also was an implosion type weapon that yielded about 23kt. Because thedetonation occurred underwater the force lifted millions of tons of water out of the lagoon
into a wide, low-hanging mushroom cloud that only rose several hundred meters in the
air before it was pulled back down by gravity into the lagoon. The vivid, heavy and low
mushroom cloud is often reproduced in images of mushroom clouds; it is only one of 8
underwater detonations of a nuclear weapon.33
The speciﬁc dynamics of the water laden mushroom cloud of the Baker test were to havedramatic impacts of the whole of Bikini Atoll and all of the materials and living things

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広島平和研究：Hiroshima Peace Research Journal, Volume 9there. Whereas an atmospheric detonation creates a fireball in the air that rises from thepoint of the epicenter high into the air, sucking up materials from the ground below (which
ﬁll the cloud and “mushroom” it outward), and then drifts on the wind depositing the ionized radioactive particles back down to the ground as fallout, the Baker mushroom cloudquickly dropped all of this material back down into the water. There was no downwind
dispersal of the fallout which meant it all concentrated in the lagoon.
The Baker explosion sunk nine ships and damaged many more, however, it was the radiation that would prove to have the most impact. As the blast wave rippled through thelagoon, and then the tons of water in the mushroom cloud fell back, a base surge of waterand mist spread across the lagoon and engulfed the target ﬂeet. “The base surge…left a kissof death on the majority of the target vessels. The white billows carried radioactive ﬁssion
products equivalent to many tons of radium.”34 Nearly all of the ships became highly radioactive with over 90% later being judged militarily useless. Most of the onboard animals had
survived the blast only to perish from radiation sickness in the ﬁrst and second week after
the explosion. Just ﬁve days after the test a top-secret telegram from the Joint Task Forceleadership was transmitted to the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the US military in Washington,
D.C. which described how, “contaminated ships became radioactive stoves, and would
have burned all living things aboard with invisible and painless but deadly radiation.”35 As
they sat in the lagoon over the coming days and weeks the hulls and then the interiors of
the ships became increasingly radioactive, compounding the risks for personnel carryingout damage assessments and decontaminating the ships and equipment. As support ships
entered and left the lagoon, they too became increasingly radioactive. All of the 42,000
service personnel assigned to the mission were being exposed, and their exposures wereincreasing daily.
Test planners had understood that after the water detonation, fission products (like strontium-90 and cesium-137) that usually distribute downwind from the mushroom cloud
would likely be retained and concentrated in Bikini lagoon, but they had not anticipated theincredibly high levels of radiation that actually did eventuate. Radiation risk in Operation
Crossroads was assessed by the Radiological Safety Section under the command of Colonel
Staﬀord Warren. Warren was a physicist and radiologist who had worked in the Manhattan
Project, and was one of the first American scientists to conduct radiological surveys inboth Hiroshima and Nagasaki in September and October 1945. As monitors working in theRadiological Safety Section observed levels rising on the target ﬂeet, and then the support
ﬂeet vessels, Warren and his staﬀ became concerned that there was no safe way for the sup-Learning the Wrong Lessons from Hiroshima: US Nuclear Testing in 1946

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port personnel to continue working and living on the boats. On August 3, nine days after
the Baker test, Warren came to the conclusion that any attempts to mediate exposures or
reduce contaminations were futile, and the only course forward was to immediately evacuate all military personnel.36
Warren had been expressing his analysis and worries to Joint Task Force Commander Vice
Admiral William Blandy. Blandy had little understanding of radiobiological issues, and on
August 10 Warren showed him a radiograph of a surgeonﬁsh caught in Bikini lagoon. The
radiograph showed a “photographic” image of the body of the ﬁsh produced solely using
the radiation coming from its body onto the photographic plate. The ﬁsh showed the presence of radiation throughout its entire body, on each scale. It also showed a glowing area inits digestive tract and stomach, revealing that the ﬁsh was not merely radioactive because
it was immersed in radiologically contaminated water, but that consuming contaminatedfood had internalized particles inside of its body which it was metabolizing. Blandy conceded that such systemic contamination being present just weeks after the Baker test put thepersonnel at too high risk to continue to work in the lagoon for several more weeks, as had
been planned. The 42,000 military personnel working as part of the Joint Task Force were
slowly transported from Bikini Atoll to Kwajalein Atoll, and from there many returned to
the US: Bikini Atoll was completely evacuated by September 26. The Charlie test, tentatively scheduled for the following year, was cancelled because of the loss of Bikini Atoll asa staging area, and the fact that the entire target ﬂeet was now too radioactive to be used.37
Following the radiological disaster of Operation Crossroads, the US military placed Bikini
Atoll on “interim status” and moved its nuclear testing program in the Marshall Islands
to Enewetak Atoll until 1954.38 During this “interim,” extensive studies were carried out
on the movement of radioactive particles through the ecosystem of the atoll, conductedprimarily by the Applied Fisheries Laboratory of the University of Washington under theaegis of the US Atomic Energy Commission.39
Operation Crossroads as a model for Cold War weapon developments
Operation Crossroads had been heavily attended, documented and promoted by media
around the world. Fascinated and terrified by the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima andNagasaki, many people feared what nuclear weaponry portended for the future, and paid
attention to the news coverage of the tests so that they might better understand the newweapons. The focus of news coverage was the detonations themselves, the immaculately

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documented explosions and mushroom clouds, and the impacts on the target ﬂeet. Becauseof this focus and the copious amounts of reporting and images from Able Day and Baker
Day, the US military was able to hide the actual radiological disaster that unfolded in the
weeks after the second test. This success in hiding the disaster would hold until the publication of the 1948 book, No Place to Hide, written by David Bradley, a medical doctor who
had been part of the radiation monitoring team in Operation Crossroads.40 As I have written
elsewhere, the book describes the tests as the radiological disaster that they were, helping
readers to grasp the nature and danger of radioactive fallout.41 Little more than a year after
Bradley’s book came out, the Soviet Union tested its ﬁrst nuclear weapon and the Cold War
began to become increasingly unnerving. Rather than being concerned about fallout, mostAmericans became terriﬁed of a direct attack by Soviet weapons (although it would havebeen nearly impossible for a Soviet bomber to enter American airspace in the early 1950s).
For the US military, Operation Crossroads provided vast amounts of information about theeffects of nuclear weapons. The attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki had been conductedon enemy territory, and US assessment teams could not enter the cities for over a month
to begin gathering data on the impacts of the attacks on materials and human beings. At
Bikini, the tests had been conducted in a controlled setting with massive amounts of instrumentation gathering data, and were entered hours later by teams of thousands of personnel
working on assessment of the detonations on ships, fuel, machinery, and living creatures.
Assessment continued even after the evacuation of the task force a few weeks after the
Baker debacle by the marine biologists from the University of Washington.
There were two clear purposes to gathering this data. First, the behavior and impacts ofnuclear detonations were to help guide the defense of military bases and assets, as well ascivil defense preparations in the United States, eﬀorts which took on increased vigor andfunding after Soviet development of similar weapons in 1949. But much more importantly
for the US, the data was to guide early strategies about how to use nuclear weapons against
an enemy in wartime to maximize damage, mortality and terror. Nuclear weapons werea revolutionary new weapon, and they did not easily fit into existing military strategies.
While their utility as “larger aerial bombs” was understood and utilized against Japan in
1945, Crossroads and subsequent tests were designed to enhance their military eﬀects.
Many of the lessons of Operation Crossroads and how the tests were integrated into military planning were laid bare in the various sub-reports assembled into the Final Report of
the Joint Chiefs of Staﬀ Evaluation Board for Operation Crossroads, which was publishedLearning the Wrong Lessons from Hiroshima: US Nuclear Testing in 1946

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internally in 1947. Tests Able and Baker were speciﬁcally designed to measure the impactof a nuclear attack on naval ships and, theoretically, a navy base. Parts of the Final Reportdetailed the impact of the pressure from the blast wave and the heat on various types ofnaval ships, and also on the component parts of ships. It discussed how the hulls of ships
were aﬀected, whether the engines were damaged; what kind of protection was aﬀorded byvarious methods of fuel storage; how far away from the epicenter a ship would need to be
to have its weapon systems and ordnance survive and continue to be usable.42
After the Able test, many ships were eﬀectively restored, could be navigated and, in theory,
return to battle. Assessments were made as to what kinds of repairs might be needed, andwhat kinds of design alterations would be most productive to facilitate the survival of aﬂeet that endured an aerial attack. The fate of test animals was used to determine the survivability at various distances of crews and their ability to engage in normal activities. A
wide range of systems were evaluated for their functionality after attack, from electricaland plumbing, to communications and navigation. Such assessments were also used to
strategize increased damage to enemy targets and the lethality of eﬀects on enemy troops
and populations. This was the primary focus of the Final Report.
A foundational document of understanding the military use of nuclear weapon effects
can be found in, “The Evaluation of the Atomic Bomb as a Military Weapon,” which was
included as Enclosure “A” of the Final Report, and dated 30 June 1947. The evaluation
concluded that the two nuclear tests of Operation Crossroads, “provided data essential to
future military planning, giving bases for the calculation of the conditions under which the
maximum destructive eﬀects of an atomic explosion will be obtained against various typesof land and water targets and against living organisms.”43 Enclosure “A” imagined boththe use of nuclear weapon eﬀects against an enemy population, and the structural nature of
atomic warfare in the future.
The two nuclear attacks against Japan were aerial attacks, as was the ﬁrst Crossroads test;
the second Crossroads test was of a shallow underwater weapon. These embodied the limits
to weapon delivery in 1946: weapons could be brought to an enemy by both plane or ship.
However, the analysts of the Bikini tests were well aware that this limitation was only atemporary boundary, and that nuclear delivery systems would come to play an essential
role in nuclear war planning: “No weapon can be more eﬀective than the means to bring it
into action against the enemy; hence the necessity for coordinated development of atomic
weapons and weapon-carriers and their integration into a series of devices, each with a

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広島平和研究：Hiroshima Peace Research Journal, Volume 9tactical or strategic purpose.” Military analysts were already imagineering the future of
nuclear warfare, “In the category of weapon-carrier may be included any means of ultimate
delivery such as aircraft, guided missiles, rockets, torpedoes and mines of all types.” Thesefuture missiles need not be based solely on land, “Inseparable from the development ofbombs and bomb-carriers should be the planning of naval surface and submarine vessels
from which atomic bomb carriers may be launched or discharged.”44 Already in 1947, after
one postwar test series, the whole of what would come to be called the “nuclear triad” wasbeing envisioned.
Similarly, analysts were hammering out the rationale of nuclear ﬁrst use, and the delegationof war making powers from the legislature to the executive. “In such warfare, the elementof surprise will be an essential, the possession of which will be the only assurance of success and whose lack may be catastrophic,” reasoned the authors, “Offense, recognized in
the past as the best means of defense, in atomic warfare will be the only means of defense.”
Therefore, Americans may have to alter their understanding of declarations of warfare,“Traditionally, the policy of the United States is one of non-aggression and, as a result, inthe past we have awaited attack before employing military force…Presently the duty of the
Commander-in-Chief (before a declaration of war by Congress) is conﬁned to action only
after the loss of American lives or treasure,” however, “In the future it must be made his
duty to defend the country against incipient attack by atomic weapons whenever anothernation is readying an atomic attack upon us.”45 Less than two years after the termination ofWorld War Two, the outlines and logics of nuclear warfare were taking shape in the wakeof the Bikini tests.
It was specifically the presence of persistent radiation from the fallout which put tens of
thousands of US military personnel at risk and eventuated in the cancellation of the third
test and the evacuation of the troops. “When a bomb is exploded underwater, lethal residual
radioactivity assumes an importance greater than the physical damage caused by the explosion,” concluded analysts. Not only was the impact of radiation more militarily useful thanthe blast and heat eﬀects of the detonation, it was speciﬁcally the fallout, and not the burstof prompt radiation which is understood as valuable. The burst of external gamma radiation that harmed so many in Hiroshima and Nagasaki “may be great for a brief period, issecondary in importance to radioactivity from other sources.”46 Those other sources being
the various paths of exposure to fallout.
In the seven months of assessment from the evacuation of Operation Crossroads personnel

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to the issuance of the evaluation of nuclear weapons as tools for warfare, it was the militaryutility of residual radiation̶fallout̶that deeply impressed the military strategists. Even
when imagining nuclear weapons as essentially larger bombs, the behavior of residual
radiation enhanced the destructive capacity of traditional, World War Two levels of destruction. When discussing cities as targets, the report details that while “conventional means ofﬁre control, emergency policing, care of the wounded and restoration of essential services”
would mitigate the blast and ﬁre impacts of atomic bombs, “the personnel for these services
would have to be recruited from outside the area and where radioactive contamination
existed could enter it only with extreme diﬃculty and after some lapse of time.”47 Here we
see the understanding that destruction is not the only military utility of the bomb, but thedisruption of recovery by radiological contamination would deal a further blow to those
who suﬀered the initial attack, and demoralize the general population.
The authors were very precise that while radioactive fallout was effective as a means of
causing sickness and death, it had a special value as a psychological terror weapon. Theycite the uncertainty of contamination among survivors as creating a long-lived disruption of the functioning of enemy societies after a nuclear attack. The report imagined thatpeople would flee an attacked city and carry radiological particles with them that could
contaminate and harm others, and that among those who fled some would develop sickness and some would die which would make all fleeing anxious about their own welfare.
This capacity for the psychological terrorizing of the whole of an enemy society, including
those who did not endure any actual physical attack, was understood as militarily transformative: a section of the report is dedicated to the concept of “Psychological Atomic
Warfare.”48 Whereas World War Two was understood as the era of total war, in which cities
had become “legitimate” targets, nuclear weapons prompted American military strategist to
begin to see whole countries, and entire populations as targets.
Legacies of Operation Crossroads
We can look at Operation Crossroads and see the emergence of an American relationshipwith nuclear weapons that would endure throughout the Cold War. The utility of nuclear
weapons as political tools; the performative power of their testing, manufacture and stockpiling; and the lack of concern for the human and ecological legacies of their production
and detonation. The presence of media from dozens of countries, the live radio broadcastof the tests, the endless repetition of film of the tests, especially the Baker test, imagesof which are among the most iconic in Cold War media, helped to focus the world media

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denoted the US as a “superpower.” The radiological disregard of human beings would be
repeated, especially in the wake of the brutal Bravo test of 1954.49
Understandings of the long-term impacts of exposures to radioactivity for the hibakusha inJapan were only beginning to come into focus at the time of Operation Crossroads, so US
military analysts were astonished at the breadth and persistence of the effects of residual
radiation on the target vessels, the support vessels, the operational personnel, and the ﬂora
and fauna of Bikini Atoll itself. These effects would be intensely studied, and over time
become central to strategic military understandings of how to wage nuclear war. Nuclear
targeting during the Cold War would focus on the use of the blast and heat of the weapons to neutralize an enemy’s nuclear weapons and capacity to retaliate, but radioactive
fallout was understood as the weapon effect that could, according to a 1954 Strategic Air
Command brieﬁng, leave the Soviet Union “a smoking, radioactive ruin at the end of twohours.”50 Fallout clouds, especially from thermonuclear weapons, were strategized to blanket the whole of enemy territory, devastating the population and making its cities unlivable.
Operation Crossroads analysts saw clearly that, “The correlation of the explosion of atomic
bombs over Japanese cities and against naval vessels, at Bikini, gives ample evidence thatthe bomb is pre-eminently a weapon for use against human-life and activities in large urban
and industrial areas, as well as seaports.”51
When Bikini Atoll was taken off of “interim status” for the Bravo test of an H-bomb in
1954, another radiological disaster occurred directly as a result of the immense fallout
cloud that drifted eastward after the detonation. Hundreds of Marshallese suﬀered exposure
to dangerous levels of radiation. Later calculations estimated the average exposure of thosefrom Rongelap (approximately 152km away from Bikini) was equal to that of people who
were 2.4km from ground zero during the nuclear attack on Hiroshima.52 The entire crewof the Daigo Fukuryū Maru tuna fishing boat was exposed to radiation and subsequently
suﬀered from radiation sickness, with one crewmember dying six months after the test.53
While the United States tried to hide the radiological impact of the Bravo test, it also
quickly integrated the lethality of such a fallout cloud hundreds of miles from the epicenterof an H-bomb attack, leading Admiral Harry Felt of the US Navy’s Pacific Command tocomment in 1961 that if the US SIOP nuclear attack plan was carried out against the Soviet
Union, he would be more concerned about fallout from the attack drifting towards bases
under his command than he would about a direct attack by the Soviets.54 As the Soviet

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Union also developed intercontinental ballistic missiles to carry thermonuclear weapons
to the continental United States, President John Kennedy warned American Civil Defense
managers in 1961 that “Radioactive fallout, extending down-wind for as much as several
hundred miles, could account for the major part of the casualties which might result from athermonuclear attack on an unprotected population.”55
This concern over the eﬀects of nuclear detonations, and speciﬁcally thermonuclear explosions did not stop the US or other nuclear weapon states from detonating them frequently
as “tests.” Just as the fallout from Operation Crossroads made return to their homes andproperty impossible for the evacuated Bikinians, someone’s home and family was downwind of these (and all) massive H-bomb tests. Little care was given to the fact that humanbeings were directly experiencing effects of the weapons that were designed as militaryeﬀects which could be inﬂicted on an enemy. When the detonations were classiﬁed as tests,
the fact that people suﬀered from the eﬀects of the weapons was not deemed warfare. This
callous disregard for downwind populations, and also for test site personnel and military
troops, was normalized at Operation Crossroads and continued throughout the Cold War.
The destruction of ecosystems, and their persistent contamination with radionuclides was
also ﬁrst conducted during Operation Crossroads, and became standard operating procedurethroughout the Cold War era of nuclear testing. Bikini Atoll became a “radiobiologicallaboratory” were the migration and transport of radioactive particles could be studied but
remediation efforts always remained performative at best. By the mid-1950s the UnitedStates was secretly gathering the bones of the dead and teeth of children around the globe
in Project Sunshine to continue to track the migration of radioactive particles, in what was,for all purposes, the Earth̶radiobiological laboratory.56
The US never conducted any remediation of Bikini Atoll, even though it has explicitly
promised the Bikinians who had been displaced that they could return to their homes a few
years after Operation Crossroads. Chemist Piero R. Danesi noted in 2009 that, “although
remedial measures and resettlement of the local population have not yet taken place, several
remedial options for Bikini were studied in detail.”57 These studies have never eventuatedin action, and now, 75 years later, multiple generations of Bikinians have not set foot on theisland. This lack of a sense of responsibility towards those whose lives were disrupted by
US nuclear testing betrays an entitlement that the US showed even to its own citizens, who
lived downwind from the Nevada Test Site that would be established in 1951, and which
would see over 900 detonations, the largest number of nuclear tests of any site on Earth.

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The radiological legacy of US nuclear weapon production and testing is daunting. Tens of
thousands of metric tons of spent nuclear fuel sit at the Hanford and Savannah River sitesthat were used to manufacture plutonium for US weapons, and countless other manufacturing sites have produced and dumped tons of radioactive waste.58 The deep geologicalrepository for non-fuel rod military high-level nuclear waste, the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant
in New Mexico, has experienced several fires and radiological leaks in the first decadesof its operations.59 The two nuclear test sites in the Marshall Islands, Bikini and Enewetak
Atolls, are heavily contaminated and laden with waste, while several additional atolls are
too contaminated for habitation due to radioactive fallout. The Nevada Test Site is an active
military site, the Nevada National Security Site, and has not been remediated. A small number of test site workers and downwinders are now eligible to receive limited compensation
through the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act.60
Conclusion: Nuclear weapons as American icons
In August 1945, the United States attacked two cities in Japan with nuclear weapons. Thisuse of weapons of mass destruction was conducted against cities and their populations.
While there were some military casualties and destruction of military assets, the majority
killed were civilians, and large sections of residential cities were destroyed. Because theweapons used were nuclear weapons, hundreds of thousands of people were exposed tobursts of prompt radiation that penetrated their whole bodies, manifesting ongoing diseaseloads that unfolded over the rest of their lives, and also blanketed large areas with longlived radioactive fallout, some of which will remain dangerous for millennia.
World War Two saw devastation on an unprecedented scale with all combatants conducting
attacks against civilian populations and urban areas. Whole sections of cities were burnedto the ground in fire bombings. The attacks in Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not uniquein their toll, but in the means of their destruction and the ongoing legacies of radiation on
those exposed during the attacks, and those who were and will be exposed to the fallout.
The whole world was shocked at what was accomplished with one bomb carried on one
plane in less than one second. Coming at the end of a war that saw tens of millions of civilians murdered, it foreshadowed an era in which whole societies might be annihilated. That
was, in fact, the plan: “If used in numbers, atomic bombs not only can nullify any nation’s
military eﬀort, but can demolish its social and economic structures and prevent their reestablishment for long periods of time,” commented the analysts of Operation Crossroads,“With such weapons, especially if employed in conjunction with other weapons of mass

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destruction as, for example, pathogenic bacteria, it is quite possible to depopulate vast areasof the earth’s surface, leaving only vestigial remnants of man’s material works.”61
The United States worked for years to achieve the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki,
spent billions of dollars, and watched as the humanity recoiled. And its leaders said: yes,more of this. Rather than looking backwards at Hiroshima and Nagasaki with humanity
and seeing an ominous warning about toying with technological apocalyptic weapons, theUnited States military looked at the destruction of those two cities, at the mass murder ofthe civilians, soldiers and children, at the radiological legacies of survivors and contaminated ecosystems, and saw the future. They prepared for a thousand Hiroshimas. They saw
power, domination and imagined themselves wielding weapons of biblical proportions, andbeing the most powerful nation ever on the face of the Earth.
There were lessons to be learned from the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima. Lessons about
the use of weapons of mass destruction against civilian populations. Lessons about theuse of radiation as a weapon, inﬂicting damage on bodies with ongoing deleterious eﬀects
long after the attack. Lessons about the radiological contamination of ecosystems and thedeposition of fallout particles that will outlive the attackers, and for some radionuclides likeplutonium, will outlive the governments making and absorbing the attacks. Lessons about
the ethics of wartime conduct and the legacies of war crimes. The United States did notlearn these lessons after Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The lessons they learned were focusedentirely on the power and destructive capacity of the weapons. They continue to embracethose toxic lessons today. After Hiroshima the United States stood at the fork of the roadtowards two futures and chose the wrong path.
Notes
1

Cited in, Barton J. Bernstein, “The Perils and Politics of Surrender: Ending the War with Japan and
Avoiding the Third Atomic Bomb” Paciﬁc Historical Review 46:1 (1977): 10.
2
Cited in, Robert A. Jacobs, “Dodging Dystopia: The Role of Nuclear Narratives in Averting Global
Thermonuclear Warfare,” in, Antony Adolf, ed., Nonkilling History: Shaping Policy with Lessons
from the Past (Honolulu: The Center for Global Nonviolence, 2010): 219-236.
3See, Neil Oatsvall, “Weather, Otters, and Bombs: Policy Making, Environmental Science and U.S.
Nuclear Weapon Testing, 1945-1958,” in, Edwin A. Martini, ed., Proving Grounds: Militarized
Landscapes, Weapons Testing, and the Environmental Impact of U.S. Bases (Seattle: University ofWashington Press, 2015): 43-74; Janet Farrell Brodie, “Contested Knowledge: The Trinity Radiation
Studies,” in, Brinda Sarathy, Janet Brodie and Vivien Hamilton, Inevitably Toxic: Historical
Perspectives on Contamination, Exposure, and Expertise (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh
Press, 2019): 50-73; “Nuclear Conquistadors: Military Colonialism in Nuclear Test Site Selection
during the Cold War,” Asian Journal of Peace-building 1:2 (2013): 157-177; Holly M. Barker,

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Bravo for the Marshallese: Regaining Control in a Post-nuclear, Post-colonial World (Stamford,
CT: Thomson-Wadsworth, 2004). Toshiro Higuchi has written about the relationship of weapon test
fallout to the interplay of politics and radiation standards, but does not really discuss the Crossroads
tests. See, Toshiro Higuchi, Political Fallout: Nuclear Weapons Testing and the Making of a Global
Environmental Crisis (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2020).
4
Its German name was the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Institut for Chemistry.
5
Lillian Hoddeson, et. al., Critical Assembly: A Technical History of Los Alamos During theOppenheimer Years, 1943-1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993): 13.
6
For a basic primer on the four fundamental forces in nature see, Masud Chaichian, Hugo Perez Rojas
and Anca Tureanu, Basic Concepts in Physics: From the Cosmos to Quarks (New York: SpringerVerlag Berlin Heidelberg, 2014): 279-283.
7
Such a weapon was first imagined by British science fiction writer H.G. Wells, who wrote a bookthat coined the term “atomic bombs” and predicted a nuclear war in the 20th century. See, H.G.
Wells, The World Set Free (London: Macmillan & Co., 1914).
8
F. G. Gosling, The Manhattan Project: Making the Atomic Bomb (Washington DC: USDOE, 2010):
vii.
9
The original history of the Manhattan Project, which details all of this is, Henry D. Smyth, Atomic
Energy for Military Purposes (York, PA: Maple Press, 1945).
10Oﬃce of Public Aﬀairs, Swords to Plowshares: A Short History of Oak Ridge National Laboratory,
1943-1993 (Oak Ridge, TN: USDOE, 1993): 3.
11
This is all examined in detail in, Critical Assembly.
12
For an examination of the radiological impact of the Trinity test, see, Kathleen M. Tucker andRobert Alvarez, “Trinity: ‘The Most Signiﬁcant Hazard of the Entire Manhattan Project’” Bulletinof the Atomic Scientists (July 15, 2019): https://thebulletin.org/2019/07/trinity-the-most-signiﬁcanthazard-of-the-entire-manhattan-project/ (accessed August 28, 2021).
13
Richard G. Hewlett and Oscar E. Anderson, Jr., The New World, 1939/1946, A History of The UnitedStates Atomic Energy Commission, Volume I (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University
Press, 1962): 347-407.
14
Barton J. Bernstein, “Truman and the A-Bomb: Targeting Noncombatants, Using the Bomb, and His
Defending the ‘Decision,’” The Journal of Military History 62:3 (1998): 547-570.
15
Susan Lindee talks about how American health physicists saw the “survivors as a scarce and precious
intellectual resource.” See, M. Susan Lindee, Suffering Made Real: American Science and theSurvivors at Hiroshima (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994): 4.
16“Japan High Court Rules 84 A-bomb ‘Black Rain’ Victims Eligible for Aid,” Kyodo News (July 14,2021): https://english.kyodonews.net/news/2021/07/608786e5a732-urgent-high-court-rules-84-abomb-black-rain-victims-eligible-for-aid.html (accessed August 26, 2021).
17
Henry L. Stimson, “The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb,” Harper’s (February, 1947), reprinted
in, SAIS Review 5:2 (1985): 7.
18“History of the ABCC-REFR,” Radiation Effects Research Foundation (2017): https://www.rerf.
or.jp/uploads/2017/09/rerf30the-1.pdf (accessed August 28, 2021).
19
The classic work on the laboratory in English is, Suﬀering Made Real.
20
See, Robert A. Jacobs, Nuclear Bodies: The Global Hibakusha (New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press, 2021), forthcoming.
21
For an example of this thinking see, Thomas C. Schelling, Arms and Influence (New Haven, CT:
Yale University Press, 1966).

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149

See, Gregg Herken, The Winning Weapon: The Atomic Bomb in the Cold War, 1945-1950 (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1988).
23
William A. Shurcliff, Bombs at Bikini: The Official Report of Operation Crossroads (New York:Wm. H. Wise & Co., 1947): 10-11. This book is the official report of Joint Task Force One, themilitary command that planned, conducted and analyzed the tests. It is the deﬁnitive public military
documentation of the tests, published the following year.
24
For an overview of this history see, Francis X. Hezel, Strangers in Their Own Land: A Century ofColonial Rule in the Caroline and Marshall Islands (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1995).
25
Matt Blitz, “When Kodak Accidentally Discovered A-Bomb Testing,” Popular Mechanics (June20, 2016): https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/energy/a21382/how-kodak-accidentallydiscovered-radioactive-fallout/ (accessed August 26, 2021).
26
Oﬃce of the Historian, Joint Task Force One, Operation Crossroads: The Oﬃcial Pictorial Record(New York: Wm. H. Wise & Company, 1946): 12. This book was published by Joint Task Force
One, as was Bombs in Bikini, and presented visual assessments of the tests to the public.
27
Bianka J. Adams, “Operation Crossroads,” The Shield: The Oﬃcial Magazine of the DTRA: SCCWMD 1:3 (2011): 4-5.
28See, Robert C. Kiste, The Bikinians: A Study in Forced Migration (Menlo Park, CA: Cummings
Publishing Company, 1974).
29
Bombs at Bikini: 2.
30
Bombs at Bikini: 2, 85, 145.
31
Bombs at Bikini: 125.
32
Bombs at Bikini: 140.
33
O. A. Pavlovsky, “Radiological Consequences of Nuclear Testing for the Population of the Former
USSR (Input Information, Models, Dose, and Risk Estimates),” in, Charles S. Shapiro, ed.,Atmospheric Nuclear Tests: Environmental and Human Consequence (New York: Springer-Verlag
Berlin Heidelberg, 1998): 219.
34
Bombs in Bikini: 159.
35
Quote taken from, “Joint Chiefs of Staff Evaluation Board for Joint Chiefs of Staff, telegram
300558Z, July 30, 1946, Top Secret, copy with editorial markings”: https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/sites/
default/files/documents/2995397/Document-19-Joint-Chiefs-of-Staff-Evaluation.pdf (accessed
August 3, 2021).
36
Jonathan M. Weisgall, Operation Crossroads: The Atomic Tests at Bikini Atoll (Annapolis, MD:
Naval Institute Press, 1994): 239.
37
Operation Crossroads: 241-244.
38
Susan C. Schultz and Vincent Schultz, “Bikini and Enewetak Marshallese: Their Atolls and Nuclear
Weapons Testing,” Critical Reviews in Environmental Science and Technology 24:1 (1994): 54.
39
See, Bikini: Radiobiological Laboratory, (Lookout Mountain Laboratory, 1949).
40
David Bradley, No Place to Hide (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1948).
41
Robert A. Jacobs, The Dragon’s Tail: Americans Face the Atomic Age (Amherst, MA: University of
Massachusetts Press, 2010): 31.
42
Bureau of Aeronautics Group, Final Report for Tests Able and Baker (Washington DC: Joint Task
Force One, 1946).
43“The Evaluation of the Atomic Bomb as a Military Weapon,” The Final Report of the Joint Chiefs ofStaﬀ Evaluation Board for Operation Crossroads, Enclosure “A” JCS 1691/3 (June 30, 1947): 16.
This (previously) top secret assessment of the tests prepared for the Joint Chiefs of Staﬀ of the US

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military presented the military assessments of the tests for strategic planning.
“The Evaluation of the Atomic Bomb as a Military Weapon”: 11.
45“The Evaluation of the Atomic Bomb as a Military Weapon”: 29-30.
46“The Evaluation of the Atomic Bomb as a Military Weapon”: 23.
47“The Evaluation of the Atomic Bomb as a Military Weapon”: 34.
48“The Evaluation of the Atomic Bomb as a Military Weapon”: 35-38.
49
See, Bravo for the Marshallese, and, “Anthropogenic Fallout.”
50
David Alan Rosenberg, “‘A Smoking Radiating Ruin at the End of Two Hours’: Documents on
American Plans for Nuclear War with the Soviet Union, 1954-1955,” International Security 6:3(1981/2): 3-38.
51“The Evaluation of the Atomic Bomb as a Military Weapon”: 32.
52
Richard G. Hewlett and Jack M. Holl, Atoms for Peace and War, 1953-1961: Eisenhower and theAtomic Energy Commission (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1989): 173-175. People
who were 2.4km from the epicenter in Hiroshima are officially recognized as hibakusha by theJapanese state, which provides them with monthly allowances and enhanced medical care. See,
“Relief for A-bomb Victims,” Japan Times (August 15, 2007): <https://www.japantimes.co.jp/
opinion/2007/08/15/editorials/relief-for-a-bomb-victims/> (accessed August 13, 2020).
53
Matashichi Oishi, The Day the Sun Rose in the West: Bikini, The Lucky Dragon, and I (Honolulu:
University of Hawaii Press, 2011).
54
See, Robert Jacobs, “Anthropogenic Fallout: The Bravo Test and the Death and Life of the Global
Ecosystem,” Hiroshima Peace Research Journal Vol. 2 (2015): 77-96. SIOP stands for “single
integrated operational plan.”
55
John F. Kennedy, “Letter to the Members of the Committee on Civil Defense of the Governors’
Conference,” (October 6, 1961): <https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/letter-the-membersthe-committee-civil-defense-the-governors-conference> (accessed February 13, 2021).
56
Project Sunshine (Santa Monica: RAND Corporation, 1953). See also, Sue Rabbitt Roff, “Project
Sunshine and the Slippery Slope: The Ethics of Tissue Sampling for Strontium-90,” Medicine,Conﬂict and Survival 18:3 (2002): 299-310.
57
Piero R. Danesi, “Remediation of Sites Contaminated by Nuclear Weapon Tests,” in, G. Voigt and F.
Fesenko, eds., Remediation of Contaminated Environments (Oxford: Elsevier, 2009): 232.
58
For an overview of just the legacy spent nuclear fuel from US nuclear weapon productions, see,
“DOE Managed Spent Nuclear Fuel,” U.S. Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board (2017): https://www.nwtrb.gov/docs/default-source/facts-sheets/doe_snf.pdf?sfvrsn=18 (accessed August 28,2021).
59
U.S. Department of Energy Oﬃce of Environmental Management, Radiological Release Event at the
Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, February 14, 2014 (Washington DC: USDOE, 2015).
60
See, “Radiation Exposure Compensation Act,” US Department of Justice: https://www.justice.gov/
civil/common/reca (accessed August 28, 2021).
61“The Evaluation of the Atomic Bomb as a Military Weapon”: 10.
44