comments

1. Dave Farris on August 27th, 2009 at 11:01 am

   Just a mind blowing picture. I watched a show on the discovery or history channel a while back about the tests at the bikini atoll. They showed the footage of some of the first big tests. I have a hard time understanding how they had the nerve, courage, stupidity, whatever… to continue testing after the first blast. They should have been shitting in their pants and declaring to never ever do this again. The blast footage they showed of the biggest of all the tests was so incredibly terrifying, it looked like the universe opened up and showed us, for a split second, that we are tiny little creatures swimming in very deep dark rough waters.

   From another perspective, my father in law participated in the testing at the bikini atoll while he was in the navy. He was on a destroyer thats mission was to drive through the fallout while a jerry rigged sprinkler system hosed the ship down with sea water. Everyone wore radiation badges so the powers that be could gage the exposure level and also the effectiveness of the sprinkler system at minimizing the radiation. At the end of the test, all the badges were collected and then everyone stood on deck and watched another test blast, like some fireworks show. He tells the story of a test that must be similar to the photo above. The bomb was detonated below the surface and one test ship was directly above the bomb. After the blast, no one could figure out where the ship directly above had gone. They found it completely beached a few miles away. Crazy crazy crazy crazy…!

2. hubs on August 27th, 2009 at 11:01 pm

   Now i’m going to have nightmares again tonight.

3. Daryl Scroggins on August 28th, 2009 at 8:36 am

   You hit it, Dave. I’ve wondered the same thing about what it would take to make scary people scare even themselves. Oppenheimer saw it, but people just wanting the kick-ass power seem always to experience only glee in the face of disappearing islands. I have seen several different pictures of the giant cylinder of water thrown up by such blasts, with little cereal-box-toy ships all becalmed around it. Those pictures always give me a feeling of disorientation–similar to the impression one gets when walking into one of those trick rooms at a carnival show where all of the furniture has been attached to the ceiling. The dizzyness of destructive power circling its creator.

4. Phil Bebbington on August 28th, 2009 at 10:31 am

   A wonderful photo, but, at what price. I always feel that I ought to be surprised at the depths man will go to destroy and yet, I never am.

5. Andrew Simone on August 28th, 2009 at 10:31 am

   Nor I, Phil, nor I.

6. Charles Nodurft on October 23rd, 2009 at 9:47 pm

   Gentlemen, my father served and watched the same blasts. He died on 9/11/94 (incredible date huh ?). Anyway, I started researching my dad’s life in the navy about a month ago and believe me, I have been awakened ! I feel for all those involved and am angry at the lack of any act of admission and any atonement to those deserving.

   I give you my heartfealt thanks and my understanding (even though I was not present). My father was on the USS McKinley, USS Harry Hubbard, and the USS Lamson.

   If you have any info that I may find helpful to my mother, please email me and give the websites I need to go to. I would truely appreciate it. I want to know, I want to learn, and I, above all, want to help my mother.

   Thank you one and all.

   I close with this; “Never have so few done for so many for so little.”

7. Jim Allen on October 25th, 2009 at 8:34 pm

   I am 83 years old. I was at Bikini for the Able and Baker tests. Few of us had any idea what radio activity was. I didn’t realize until many years later that our government had used us as guinea pigs. If you want to see what radio activity will do to a human being, get a copy of the video, “Radio Bikini. “It shows what happened to one of the young sailors who was aboard a destroyer at Able and Baker. Lord only knows how many others suffered the same fate.
   Had I known what we were facing I would have jumped ship in Pearl Harbor and faced the consequences. Fortunately I came out of it with no problems that I am aware of.

8. Daryl Scroggins on October 26th, 2009 at 10:21 am

   Jim Allen–I’m so sorry you had to go through that terrible “use” of your fine service to us. I have heard such stories from others–some family members–and it always brings to me a huge mix of emotions. The strength required to walk straight into what very well might kill you staggers me. I’m glad to hear that you were spared the horrible effects of radiation.

9. Valerie Bailey on November 11th, 2009 at 4:15 pm

   My grandfather was also involved with Able and Baker, he today is my hero. I remember him having to fight to prove that the cancer he has had to fight with my whole life was from these test. He is constantly having surgery after surgery from skin cancer. He is so very strong to go thru everything he does from this. The idea of being exposed to all the radiation breaks my heart for all these mean. I feel they should all be heavily compensated for it. Although there is not enough to compensate for all the skin graphs and surgeries he’s had to go through. The stories he tells me of this operation crossroads, is very amazing, but it makes me look at our government in a different light. My grandfather did recieve the Victory medal from Truman for this but look at the price he’s had to pay. He is truly my hero.

10. Sheila Ryan on November 11th, 2009 at 6:06 pm

    Valerie, yours is a powerful post on this Veterans (Armistice) Day.

11. sue sheets on December 2nd, 2009 at 6:41 pm

    My brother was on the Navy ship as a young sailor testing nukes on the islands. A few years ago he had me research as the VA told him no records showed him on the ships and the records burned in the 1970s in St. Louis. I researched the ship, found it named after a town in Wyoming and called the local library (2007). Not only was it the ship, they had a copy of the original manifest with his name on it! He had suffered from burning skin, then swollen private parts that had to be operated on, two children born with the need for braces on their legs. He has skin disorders at 73 years of age.

    What I saw and purchased for him was the DVD showing the “Bikini Islands (Bikini Atoll) and the sailors in underwear swabbing the decks without even a mask on. He told me they went once a week below and a geiger counter was used to see if they were active!

    His ship was painted in San Francisco, still active – painted again and then sunk 50 miles off of the coast line because they decommissioned it. I was told this when I called the libray. He went to the reunion and saw some of the original buddies.

    US Government is waiting until those who were there die. Agent Orange had a congressman who fought for the soldiers in Viet Nam. Where are they for these men?

12. Dave Farris on December 2nd, 2009 at 7:15 pm

    Sue – Sounds about right… my father-in-law says the same thing. He gets the VA newsletter and says that they just now are asking for people involved who have shown specific health issues. His theory is that most of these vets are not with us anymore which means a whole lot less liability.

13. Charles Nodurft on December 3rd, 2009 at 10:50 am

    My father too, was at Operation Crossroads and Sandstone. I have been researching his naval and medical history for during his military life. What I have found has not only astounded me, but infuriated me. My father was Clair A. Nodurft and was aboard the Hubbard, Mt. McKinley, Lamson, and St. Croix as a radioman. He was in the Navy from 12/1/44 until 9/24/48 and was known as “Rod”. I watched my father die of so many things one after the other and the doctors not being able to do anything. If anyone has sites that I might get the rosters for these ships, please let me know. Fifty years of silence is enough.

14. Come for the posts, stay for the comments : clusterflock on December 3rd, 2009 at 11:01 am

    [...] few months ago I posted a picture of Operation Crossroads Baker and it has been slowly accumulating some rather interesting comments. For [...]

15. Dave Farris on December 9th, 2009 at 4:19 pm

    I came across an interesting and terrifying passage while reading, “The Devil’s Teeth” by Susan Casey (A fascinating book about the history of the Farallone Islands and the many great white sharks that inhabit the waters).

    “The radioactive debris came from Hunters Point Naval Shipyard, near San Fransisco, home of the Naval Radiological Defense Lab, and Los Alamos, birthplace of the atomic bomb. Hunter’s Point, in particular, had been so sloppy with toxic byproducts that, since 1989 when it was declared a Superfund site, $338 million has been spent trying to clean it up. And the work continues.

    They were repairing the ships, all right. In the late forties, at least sixty warships that had been used for atomic target practice in the South Pacific were towed back to Hunters Point for decontamination. After the were sandblasted and scoured with chlorinated lime, flushed with detergent, and doused with solvents, a few of them were still so hot they were deemed beyond hope, and plans to were made to secretly sink them far out at sea. Present on this roster of lost causes was the USS Independence, a ten-thousand-ton aircraft carrier, one of the navy’s largest. In 1955 it was quietly scuttled in the Gulf of the Farallones.

    Originally, the navy maintained that it was buried in a classified “safe” place four hundred miles offshore. But people claimed to have seen the ship go down right outside of San Francisco Bay, and sure enough, a precisely warship-sized and shaped object was indentified by sonar only twenty miles from the Golden Gate Bridge. To make matters worse, before it was sunk it had been loaded up the “extra” nuclear waste, crammed from stem to stern with “mixed fission” products. Though no one can tell you exactly what “mixed fission” means, it’s likely to have included the most noxious remnants of the ship-cleaning operation. And some of the boats, including the Independence, had been so close to the mushroom clouds that their steel hulls had burst into flames.”

    So let’s also consider the poor unknowing individuals working on these lovely cleanup projects and also the abundance of sea life in the area:

    “home to at least 5 commercial fisheries…”, “and that the government itself – going back to 1909 when Theodore Roosevelt had first declared the area a refuge – had designated worthy of extraspecial protection”

    Sickening to say the least…

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