Circa Date

Jul 1969

Description

Thirteen years after the Bravo shot, the Defense Atomic Support Agency (one of the predecessors of the Defense Threat Reduction Agency) sponsored an interdisciplinary conference in October 1967 on “selected effects” of “general war” that brought together specialists in genetics, radiation biology, nuclear weapons, physics, and pathology, among other disciplines. Several participants were directly involved in the aftermath of Bravo, either in Japan or in the Marshall Islands, including Merril Eisenbud, Robert Conard and Charles Dunham. Other participants, such as Stafford Warren, had played an important role in the Manhattan Project, while Theodore “Ted” Taylor had been a weapons designer at Los Alamos and was becoming increasingly critical of nuclear weapons.

In his recent book, Blown Away, Walter Pincus provided a fascinating discussion of this conference, including his finding that participants agreed that the U.S. government officials had “not told the truth initially about what happened to the Marshallese after Bravo, nor had they been honest about the impact of radioactivity in fallout.”[32] To such points, one of the participants, Frank Fremont-Smith of the New York Academy of Sciences, observed that “every government gets caught in this kind of thing or is in danger of getting caught in this kind of thing. But the first thing to do on the government’s part is to deny that anything dangerous has happened, which is almost standard procedure, and then gradually it leaks out, whereas actually this is the way that people lose faith in the government.”

Merril Eisenbud spoke pointedly about the repercussions in Japan of the Strauss press conference, noting that it included statements that “were very offensive to the Japanese and that caused things to deteriorate so far as [Dr. John] Morton and myself were concerned.” One was Strauss’s claim that that the burns on the Lucky Dragon crew were “not due to radiation but … to lye produced when the coral was calcined in the fireball and then fell out on the fishermen.” The other was Strauss’s statement that the Lucky Dragon was inside the danger zone. Eisenbud stated that “this coming straight from the horse’s mouth, so to speak, [was] widely publicized, nationally televised, and presumably [was] an authoritative statement, [and] made it very difficult for John Morton and me to be effective any longer.”

Source

Google Books online, Proceedings: Second Interdisciplinary Conference on Selected Effects of a General War Volume II

Document published in following posting(s):

Castle BRAVO at 70: The Worst Nuclear Test in U.S. History

Feb 29, 2024

DASAIAC [Defense Atomic Support Agency Information and Analysis Center] Special Report 95, Proceedings: Second Interdisciplinary Conference on Selected Effects of a General War Volume II (Santa Barbara: DASA Information and Analysis Center, 1969), extracts