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Japan blocked presentations on nuclear effects at 1955 U.N. confab
Japan blocked presentations on nuclear effects at 1955 U.N. confab
GlobalPost
The Japanese government, facing U.S. pressure, moved to block presentations by Japanese scientists about the effects of radioactivity at a U.N. conference on atomic energy in 1955 in Geneva, according to declassified U.S. documents.
The documents highlight the U.S. readiness to promote the "peaceful use" of nuclear power and Japan's stance to toe the U.S. line on the matter despite mounting concern in Japan about radioactivity's possible impact on humans.
Calls were growing in Japan at that time for a ban on atomic and hydrogen bombs following the exposure of a Japanese trawler, the Fukuryu Maru No. 5, to radioactive fallout from a U.S. hydrogen bomb test on Bikini Atoll in the Pacific in 1954. One crew member died later that year.
"The United States was fearful that presentations on nuclear damage would develop into a debate on banning nuclear tests and nuclear weapons use," said Toshihiro Higuchi, an associate lecturer at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, who found the documents at the National Archives and Records Administration of the United States.
The case concerned the first meeting of the U.N.-sponsored International Conference on the Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy in Geneva in August 1955...
GlobalPost
The Japanese government, facing U.S. pressure, moved to block presentations by Japanese scientists about the effects of radioactivity at a U.N. conference on atomic energy in 1955 in Geneva, according to declassified U.S. documents.
The documents highlight the U.S. readiness to promote the "peaceful use" of nuclear power and Japan's stance to toe the U.S. line on the matter despite mounting concern in Japan about radioactivity's possible impact on humans.
Calls were growing in Japan at that time for a ban on atomic and hydrogen bombs following the exposure of a Japanese trawler, the Fukuryu Maru No. 5, to radioactive fallout from a U.S. hydrogen bomb test on Bikini Atoll in the Pacific in 1954. One crew member died later that year.
"The United States was fearful that presentations on nuclear damage would develop into a debate on banning nuclear tests and nuclear weapons use," said Toshihiro Higuchi, an associate lecturer at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, who found the documents at the National Archives and Records Administration of the United States.
The case concerned the first meeting of the U.N.-sponsored International Conference on the Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy in Geneva in August 1955...
http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/kyodo-news-international/140227/japan-blocked-presentations-nuclear-effects-at-1955-un
5 replies
= new reply since forum marked as read
= new reply since forum marked as read
...which caused the death of the Japanese fisherman on the "Fortunate Dragon" and many health problems and early deaths for the Marshall Islanders who were also exposed.
An excellent discussion of the blast and its fallout...radioactive, as well as political and social... from The Nuclear Secrecy Blog by Alex Wellerstein is here: Castle Bravo at 60 -
(emphasis mine)
Tomorrow, March 1, 2014, is the 60th anniversary of the Castle Bravo nuclear test. I’ve written about it several times before, but I figured a discussion of why Bravo matters was always welcome. Bravo was the first test of a deliverable hydrogen bomb by the United States, proving that you could not only make nuclear weapons that had explosive yields a thousand times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb, but that you could make them in small-enough packages that they could fit onto airplanes. It is was what truly inaugurated the megaton age (more so than the first H-bomb test, Ivy Mike, which was explosively large but still in a bulky, experimental form). As a technical demonstration it would be historically important even if nothing else had happened
But nobody says something like that unless other things — terrible things — did happen. Two things went wrong. The first is that the bomb was even more explosive than the scientists thought it was going to be. Instead of 6 megatons of yield, it produced 15 megatons of yield, an error of 250%, which matters when you are talking about millions of tons of TNT. The technical error, in retrospect, reveals how grasping their knowledge still was: the bomb contained two isotopes of lithium in the fusion component of the design, and the designers assumed only one of them would be reactive, but they were wrong. The second problem is that the wind changed. Instead of carrying the copious radioactive fallout that such a weapon would produce over the open ocean, where it would be relatively harmless, it instead carried it over inhabited atolls in the Marshall Islands. This necessitated evacuation, long-term health monitoring, and produced terrible long-term health outcomes for many of the people on those islands.
If it had just been natives who were exposed, the Atomic Energy Commission might have been able to keep things hushed up for awhile — but it wasn’t. A Japanese fishing boat, ironically named the Fortunate Dragon, drifted into the fallout plume as well and returned home sick and with a cargo of radioactive tuna. One of the fishermen later died (whether that was because of the fallout exposure or because of the treatment regime is apparently still a controversial point). It became a major site of diplomatic incident between Japan, who resented once again having the distinction of having been irradiated by the United States, and this meant that Bravo became extremely public. Suddenly the United States was, for the first time, admitting it had the capability to make multi-megaton weapons. Suddenly it was having to release information about long-distance, long-term contamination. Suddenly fallout was in the public mind — and its popular culture manifestations (Godzilla, On the Beach) soon followed.
But it’s not just the public who started thinking about fallout differently. The Atomic Energy Commission wasn’t new to the idea of fallout — they had measured the plume from the Trinity test in 1945, and knew that ground bursts produced radioactive debris.
So you’d think that they’d have made lots of fallout studies prior to Castle. I had thought about producing some kind of map with all of the various fallout plumes through the 1950s superimposed on it, but it became harder than I thought — there are just a lot fewer fallout plumes prior to Bravo than you might expect. Why? Because prior to Bravo, they generally did not map downwind fallout plumes for shots in Marshall Islands — they only mapped upwind plumes.
But nobody says something like that unless other things — terrible things — did happen. Two things went wrong. The first is that the bomb was even more explosive than the scientists thought it was going to be. Instead of 6 megatons of yield, it produced 15 megatons of yield, an error of 250%, which matters when you are talking about millions of tons of TNT. The technical error, in retrospect, reveals how grasping their knowledge still was: the bomb contained two isotopes of lithium in the fusion component of the design, and the designers assumed only one of them would be reactive, but they were wrong. The second problem is that the wind changed. Instead of carrying the copious radioactive fallout that such a weapon would produce over the open ocean, where it would be relatively harmless, it instead carried it over inhabited atolls in the Marshall Islands. This necessitated evacuation, long-term health monitoring, and produced terrible long-term health outcomes for many of the people on those islands.
If it had just been natives who were exposed, the Atomic Energy Commission might have been able to keep things hushed up for awhile — but it wasn’t. A Japanese fishing boat, ironically named the Fortunate Dragon, drifted into the fallout plume as well and returned home sick and with a cargo of radioactive tuna. One of the fishermen later died (whether that was because of the fallout exposure or because of the treatment regime is apparently still a controversial point). It became a major site of diplomatic incident between Japan, who resented once again having the distinction of having been irradiated by the United States, and this meant that Bravo became extremely public. Suddenly the United States was, for the first time, admitting it had the capability to make multi-megaton weapons. Suddenly it was having to release information about long-distance, long-term contamination. Suddenly fallout was in the public mind — and its popular culture manifestations (Godzilla, On the Beach) soon followed.
But it’s not just the public who started thinking about fallout differently. The Atomic Energy Commission wasn’t new to the idea of fallout — they had measured the plume from the Trinity test in 1945, and knew that ground bursts produced radioactive debris.
So you’d think that they’d have made lots of fallout studies prior to Castle. I had thought about producing some kind of map with all of the various fallout plumes through the 1950s superimposed on it, but it became harder than I thought — there are just a lot fewer fallout plumes prior to Bravo than you might expect. Why? Because prior to Bravo, they generally did not map downwind fallout plumes for shots in Marshall Islands — they only mapped upwind plumes.
A medical inspection of a Marshallese woman by an American doctor. “Project 4,”
the biomedical effects program of Operation Castle was initially planned to be concerned
with “mainly neutron dosimetry with mice” but after the accident an additional group,
Project 4.1, was added to study the long-term exposure effects in human beings — the Marshallese.
More at the link...
