News Politics With Charles P Pierce It's The 70th Anniversary Of The Castle Bravo Nuclear Test Reflections on a time when we didn't know what the hell we were doing By Charles P Pierce PUBLISHED MAR 01 2024 9 23 AM EST Pictures from History Getty Images O ne of my favorite e-mail correspondents is the National Security Archive at The George Washington University in D C These guys specialize in bringing to light the hidden archaeology of the Cold War Their latest is a dossier on Castle Bravo the disastrous 1954 H-Bomb test on Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands From the dossier The Bravo detonation in the Castle test series had an explosive yield of 15 megatons—1 000 times that of the weapon that destroyed Hiroshima and nearly three times the six megatons that its planners estimated The detonation vaporized some ten million tons of sand coral and water that turned into a 100-mile-wide fallout cloud spewing radioactive debris on the inhabitants of Marshall Island atolls U S military personnel and Japanese fishermen aboard the Lucky Dragon Bravo’s fallout necessitated the evacuation of over 230 people from Rongelap Rongerik and Utirik atolls all part of the U S trusteeship for the Marshall Islands including 28 U S military personnel on Rongerik The people of Rongelap had the greatest exposure to radioactive contamination When the toxic cloud arrived at Rongelap located about 110 miles from the test site the fallout looked like snow children played with the irradiated flakes while others kept working on outdoor tasks The immediate health effects were serious and long-lasting and Rongelap became uninhabitable The was the bomb that all of us afraid of nuclear fallout and that got rural families laying in canned goods into the root cellar In addition 23 Japanese fishermen aboard the Lucky Dragon Fukuryu Maru were sickened by radiation exposure and the subsequent death of one crewman helped bring international media attention to the dangers of nuclear fallout U S -Japan relations were further roiled by a general sense of panic about potentially radioactive tuna among other things and the damage that such a perception could cause to Japanese exports The health effects on the crew and the people of the Marshall Islands and concerns about the economic impact of the Bravo radiological disaster strongly influenced world opinion against nuclear testing helping to spark at movement that ultimately led to the 1963 Limited Test Ban Treaty JFK's last triumph The dossier is chillingly precise about how shot through with hubris braced by a kind of willful ignorance the U S nuclear program was According to the recollections of Merril Eisenbud who was the director of the U S Atomic Energy Commission’s AEC Health and Safety Laboratory in New York “there was a very very influential group of people both among the military and civilians who insisted that there never was any … fallout” from the Ivy Mike test Thus when the AEC “recommended an evacuation capability … this was denied by the military on the basis that it wasn’t necessary that there would not be any fallout ” See Document 43 Speaking to such failings Wellerstein wrote that Castle Bravo is a “cautionary tale about hubris and incompetence in the nuclear age ” where scientists and military officials detonated “a weapon whose size they did not know whose effects they did not correctly forecast whose legacy will not soon be outlived ” One of the scientists in the dossier recalled the headlong race for the bigger boom-boom and he summed the whole thing up quite admirably “We Didn’t Know What the Hell We Were Doing ” No wonder everybody in my generation grew up neurotic related story The U S Has Enabled Netanyahu Long Enough CHARLES P PIERCE Charles P Pierce is the author of four books most recently Idiot America and has been a working journalist since 1976 He lives near Boston and has three children