American Atomic Bomb Test 1951

The American atomic bomb test in 1951 at Yucca Flats, N.M. USA put a lot of troops at risk. You can see from the photograph that the troops are bunched together not that far away from ground zero.

At the time the American government scientists should have had a darn good idea that exposure to an atomic bomb blast from such a close distance was not a good idea. Not if you cared about the health of the troops. After all the US had been monitoring the terrible effects and health issues faced by the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki for six years, since 1945.

You can tell from the photo that the troops were given a good view of the atomic bomb test. I doubt if any of them could ever forget the event. 

Any reasonable analysis of the data obtained from the Hiroshima and Nagasaki survivors would have shown that exposure to massive doses of radiation is going to cause health problems. Yet the US government ordered American troops to be observers from open trenches just six miles from ground zero.

The photo shows some of the troops who took part in the Buster Dog” operation. Desert Rock I – the first U.S. nuclear field exercise on land was conducted in association with the Dog shot. In the weeks before the shot the assembled troops (from the 188th Airborne, 127th Engineer Battalion, and the 546th Field Artillery Battalion) dug field emplacements to simulate a defensive deployment southwest of the shot location.

The troops observed the shot from a point six miles from ground zero, were transported to the defensive emplacements to view the weapon effects, and then conducted maneuvers in the area. Since this shot was an air burst there was no local fallout, although some neutron-induced radioactivity existed.

One of the tests, Buster-Jangle, released about 10,500 kilocuries of radioiodine (I-131) into the atmosphere (for comparison, Trinity released about 3200 kilocuries of radioiodine). This produced total civilian radiation exposures amounting to 7.4 million person-rads of thyroid tissue exposure (about 2% of all exposure due to continental nuclear tests). This can be expected to eventually cause about 2300 cases of thyroid cancer, leading to some 120 deaths.

Why would the US government expose American citizens and America troops to this level of risk? The answer is not very comforting.

In 1951 the US and the old Soviet Union were involved in the cold war which intensified with the start of the Korea War. The US came very close, too close, to using nuclear weapons on the Korean peninsula. One of the reasons that General Douglas MacArthur was sacked by President Harry Truman was that MacArthur was opposed to the use of nuclear weapons.

The Buster-Jangle tests were thought necessary to see how troops could be used in combat operations in a battle space where nuclear weapons were actually used. The troop’s health was secondary to national security interests.

The key words here are “national security interests”. In 1951 as is the case today, if the President and his team thinks that there are issues of national security interests your rights as a private citizen become secondary or non existence. The veneer of living in a democracy can become mighty thin when those in power toss out the words “national security interests”.

You might even be used as a guinea pig.

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