Crossroads Follow-up
All ships leak and require the regular operation of bilge pumps to stay afloat. If their bilge pumps could not be operated, the target ships would eventually sink. Only one target ship suffered this fate, the Prinz Eugen, which sank in the Kwajalein lagoon on December 22. The rest were kept afloat long enough to be deliberately sunk or dismantled. After the August 10 decision to stop decontamination work at Bikini, the surviving target fleet was towed to Kwajalein Atoll where the live ammunition and fuel could be offloaded in uncontaminated water. The move was accomplished during the remainder of August and September.
Eight of the major ships and two submarines were towed back to the United States and Hawaii for radiological inspection. Twelve target ships were so lightly contaminated that they were remanned and sailed back to the United States by their crews. Ultimately, only nine target ships were able to be scrapped rather than scuttled. The remaining target ships were destroyed by sinking off Bikini or Kwajalein Atolls, or near the Hawaiian Islands or the California coast during 1946–1948.
The support ships were decontaminated as necessary and received a radiological clearance before they could return to the fleet. This required a great deal of experimentation at Navy shipyards in the United States, primarily at San Francisco, California. The destroyer Laffey required "sandblasting and painting of all underwater surfaces, and acid washing and partial replacement of salt-water piping and evaporators."
Finally, a formal resurvey was conducted in mid-1947 to study long-term effects of the Crossroads tests. According to the official report, decontamination efforts "revealed conclusively that removal of radioactive contamination of the type encountered in the target vessels in test Baker cannot be accomplished successfully."
On August 11, 1947, Life Magazine summarized the report in a 14-page article with 33 pictures. The article stated, "If all the ships at Bikini had been fully manned, the Baker Day bomb would have killed 35,000 crewmen. If such a bomb were dropped below New York's Battery in a stiff south wind, 2 million people would die." Although it was accurately written, a casual reader of the article may have confused the grisly effects of Able's transitory fireball radiation on the close-in test animals with the equally deadly but more widespread and persistent contamination from Baker's base surge. Aside from the Life article, the report received little public attention.
The contamination problem was not widely appreciated by the general public until 1948, when No Place to Hide, a best-selling book by David Bradley, M.D., was serialized in the Atlantic Monthly, condensed by the Reader's Digest, and selected by the Book of the Month Club. In his preface, Bradley, a key member of the Radiological Safety Section at Bikini known as the "Geiger men," asserted that "the accounts of the actual explosions, however well intended, were liberally seasoned with fantasy and superstition, and the results of the tests have remained buried in the vaults of military security." His description of the Baker test and its aftermath brought to world attention the problem of radioactive fallout from nuclear weapons.
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