In the fall of 1945 Eastman Kodak began receiving complaints of damaged industrial X-ray film. It appeared speckled, as if it had measles.
A little detective work suggested radioactive debris from the Trinity detonation in south-central New Mexico in July had traveled far from its point of origin. An Indiana papermill manufacturing strawboard, used in the packaging of the film, took in contaminated river water. The strawboard then left its mark on the film emulsion. It was an unintended consequence of the world’s first detonation of an atomic bomb.
It would be a trivial event except unintended consequences are a recurring pattern of the atomic age.
There was an over-arching expectation that detonating an atomic device posed minimal risk to public health as long as fallout did not “rainout” or come back to earth in concentrated form due to precipitation. It was anticipated that dry fallout was only a hazard within a limited distance downwind of the detonation point. Beyond this, it was assumed it would get lost amid the expanse of nature.
I refer to this as the diffusion premise. It stipulates that nature is so vast and so robust that it can absorb the harmful provocations of humanity without deleterious side-effects. There is space for dilution and dispersion.
Figure 1 is the Trinity shot. This is the image that typically comes to mind.
Figure 2 depicts radiation damaged Kodak film as a consequence of Trinity fallout. It may not elicit repeated viewing compared to pictures of ascending mushroom clouds. But it is one of the most instructive images of the atomic age. It illustrates not simply the limits of the diffusion premise but the reciprocal entanglement between the human and the non-human, the social and transient energy set afoot in an unbounded manner.
The figure above is, arguably, how we should really think about the Trinity detonation.
What is missing in the modern worldview is the “force of things.” The nonhuman world is not simply pliable and inert but conjures activity unto itself. Nature has agency as expressed in its efficacy, force, and propensity for transformation.
Radioactivity does things. Sub-atomic particles collide, shatter, and evoke change. Gamma waves can strip an atom of one or more of its electrons such that it becomes “ionized.” An ionized atom exhibits an electrical charge as the balance between electrons and protons is disrupted. And liberated electrons cause cellular damage.
“In living tissue, ionization sets off a chain of physical, chemical, and biological changes that can result in serious illness, genetic defects, or death,” Catherine Caufield notes.
And while somatic injury is limited to the exposed individual, genetic damage is passed on to successive generations. Radioactivity possesses movement, force, and pernicious temporal persistence.
Plans were afoot less than a month after the decimation at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, in August of 1945. There was a proposal to test this new means of destruction on scuttled naval vessels, including Japanese ships captured during the war. Despite the scientific data acquired, there was an element of conceit behind the sudden need to conduct an atomic blast on naval vessels when no other country possessed atomic weapons.
“In truth, the exercise seems to have been motivated primarily by an eagerness to blow something up,” Gerald DeGroot argues.
Operation Crossroads was conducted at Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands in July of 1946 and included two detonations. Shot Able was a 23-kiloton airdrop detonated over the lagoon at Bikini. Shot Baker was a 23 kiloton sub-surface blast producing a towering column of seawater rising 6,000 feet.
It was the world’s first underwater atomic detonation.
Figure 3 illustrates shot Baker. It is one of the most reproduced images of the atomic age–a towering column of water in the shape of a mushroom cloud. (Note the naval vessels surrounding the base of the water column.)
Biologists from the University of Washington Radiation Ecology Laboratory began collecting fish from Bikini Atoll in the summer of 1947. They were surprised to discover that many glowed when subjected to X-ray examination. They were radioactive. It was anticipated that among the vastness of the Pacific the radioactive remnants of shot Baker would dissipate and dilute. Instead, they were absorbed by the biota, which was then consumed by fish, in a cascading manner. Radioactive elements were moving upon the food chain.
Figure 4 is a radioactive wrasse collected by the University of Washington biologists one year after shot Baker. It may not be as evocative as Figure 3, which depicts the newfound power of the atomic age, but it is arguably much more revealing.
X-ray film made visible the vibrancy of sub-atomic particles undergoing radioactive decay in the wake of the Trinity detonation and at Bikini Atoll. These were early indications of concentration and connectivity rather than diffusion. During the era of U.S. atmospheric atomic testing, between 1945-1962, a variety of radionuclides served as tracers highlighting ecological dynamics and pathways which invariably led back to human exposure, in one manner or another.
Splitting the atom reveals nature is not a vast, expansive void in which contaminants simply get lost. In the atomic age things, energetic things, continually come back around, again and again.
And it illustrates what humanity least wants to hear: humility and prudence in our engagement with nature are virtues to be embraced. This encompasses greater respect for ecological processes in-and-of themselves and as intertwined with human activity. We scarcely master but prodigiously manipulate, and the legacy of open-air atomic testing illustrates the liabilities of confusing manipulation with mastery, and knowledge for wisdom.
For more information:
J.H. Webb, “The Fogging of Photographic Film by Radioactive Contaminants in Cardboard Packaging Materials,” Physical Review 76, no. 3 (1949).
Catherine Caufield, Multiple Exposures: Chronicles of the Radiation Age (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1990).
Gerard J. DeGroot, The Bomb: A Life (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005).
Jane Bennett, “The Force of Things: Steps toward an Ecology of Matter,” Political Theory 32, no. 3 (2004): 347-372.
Jonathan M. Weisgall, Operation Crossroads: The Atomic Tests at Bikini Atoll (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1994).
Laura J. Martin, “The X-Ray Images that Showed Midcentury Scientists How Radiation Affects an Ecosystem,” Slate, December 28, 2015 (https://slate.com/human-interest/2015/12/how-midcentury-ecologists-used-x-ray-radioautographs-to-see-how-radiation-moves-through-bodies.html).