The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid_ A Memoir - Bill Bryson [53]
Within minutes they weren’t feeling terribly well. No one exposed to the fallout had any appetite for breakfast that morning. Within hours many were severely nauseated and blistering prolifically wherever ash had touched bare skin. Over the next few days, their hair came out in clumps and some started hemorrhaging internally.
Also caught in the fallout were twenty-three puzzled fishermen on a Japanese boat called, with a touch of irony that escaped no one, the Lucky Dragon. By the time they got back to Japan most of the crewmen were deeply unwell. The haul from their trip was unloaded by other hands and sent to market, where it vanished among the thousands of other catches landed in Japanese ports that day. Unable to tell which fish was contaminated and which was not, Japanese consumers shunned fish altogether for weeks, nearly wrecking the industry.
As a nation, the Japanese were none too happy about any of this. In less than ten years they had achieved the unwelcome distinction of being the first victims of both the atom and hydrogen bombs, and naturally they were a touch upset and sought an apology. We declined to oblige. Instead Lewis Strauss, a former shoe salesman who had risen to become chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission (it was that kind of age), responded by suggesting that the Japanese fishermen were in fact Soviet agents.
Increasingly, the United States moved its tests to Nevada, where, as we have seen, people were a good deal more appreciative, though it wasn’t just the Marshall Islands and Nevada where we tested. We also set off nuclear bombs on Christmas Island and the Johnston atoll in the Pacific, above and below water in the South Atlantic Ocean, and in New Mexico, Nevada, Colorado, Alaska, and Hattiesburg, Mississippi (of all places), in the early years of testing. Altogether between 1946 and 1962, the United States detonated just over a thousand nuclear warheads, including some three hundred in the open air, hurling numberless tons of radioactive dust into the atmosphere. The USSR, China, Britain, and France detonated scores more.
It turned out that children, with their trim little bodies and love of milk, were particularly adept at absorbing and holding on to strontium 90—the chief radioactive product of fallout. Such was our affinity for strontium that in 1958 the average child—which is to say me and thirty million other small people—was carrying ten times more strontium than he had only the year before. We were positively aglow with the stuff.
So the tests were moved underground, but that didn’t always work terribly well either. In the summer of 1962, defense officials detonated a hydrogen bomb buried deep beneath the desert of Frenchman Flat, Nevada. The blast was so robust that the land around it rose by some three hundred feet and burst open like a very bad boil, leaving a crater eight hundred feet across. Blast debris went everywhere. “By four in the afternoon,” the historian Peter Goodchild has written, “the radioactive dust cloud was so thick in Ely, Nevada, two hundred miles from Ground Zero, that the street lights had to be turned on.” Visible fallout drifted down on six western states and two Canadian provinces—though no one officially acknowledged the fiasco and no public warnings were issued advising people not to touch fresh ash or let their children roll around in it. Indeed, all details of the incident remained secret for two decades until a curious journalist filed suit under the Freedom of Information Act to find out what had happened that day.*10
While we waited for the politicians and military to give us an actual World War III, the comic books were pleased to provide an imaginary one. Monthly offerings with titles like Atomic War! and Atom-Age Combat began to appear and were avidly sought out by connoisseurs in the Kiddie Corral. Ingeniously, the visionary minds behind these comics took atomic weapons away from the generals