Operation Crossroads - Failed Baker Cleanup and Program Termination

Failed Baker Cleanup and Program Termination

The program termination on August 10, sixteen days after Baker, was the result of a showdown between Dr. Stafford Warren, the Army colonel in charge of radiation safety for Operation Crossroads, and Admiral Blandy. One of Warren's radsafe monitors later described him as "the only Army colonel who ever sank a Navy flotilla."

Warren had been Chief of the Medical Section of the Manhattan Project, and was in charge of radiation safety at the first nuclear test, Trinity, in New Mexico, as well as of the on-ground inspections at Hiroshima and Nagasaki after the bombings. At Crossroads, it was his job to keep the sailors safe during the cleanup, and to avoid giving them grounds to sue the Navy if health problems developed later.

The cleanup was hampered by two significant factors: the unexpected base surge, and the lack of a viable cleanup plan. It was understood that if the water column fell back into the lagoon, which it did, any ships that were drenched by falling water might be contaminated beyond redemption. Nobody expected that to be the fate of virtually the entire target fleet, which it was because of the base surge. No decontamination procedures had been tested in advance to see if they would work and to measure the potential risk to personnel. In the absence of a decontamination protocol, the ships were cleaned using traditional Navy deck-scrubbing methods: hoses, mops, and brushes, with water, soap, and lye. The sailors had no protective clothing.

By August 3, Colonel Warren concluded the entire effort was futile and dangerous. The unprotected sailors were stirring up radioactive material and contaminating their skin, clothing, and, presumably, their lungs. When they returned to their support ship living quarters, they contaminated the shower stalls, laundry facilities, and everything they touched. Warren demanded an immediate halt to the entire cleanup operation. He was especially concerned about plutonium, which by weight made up 78% of the contaminating material and was undetectable on site.

Warren also observed that the radsafe procedures were not being followed correctly. Fire boats got too close to the target ships they were hosing and drenched their crews with radioactive spray. One fire boat had to be taken out of service. Film badges showed 67 overdoses between August 6 and 9. More than half of the 320 Geiger counters available shorted out and became unavailable. The crews of two target ships, Wainright and Carteret, moored far from the detonation site, had moved back on board and become overexposed. They were immediately evacuated back to the United States.

Captain L. H. Bibby, commanding officer of the apparently undamaged battleship New York, accused Warren's radsafe monitors of holding their Geiger counters too close to the deck. He wanted to reboard his ship and sail it home. The steadily dropping radiation counts on the target ships gave an illusion that the cleanup was working, but Warren explained that although fission products were losing some of their gamma ray potency through radioactive decay the ships were still contaminated. The danger of ingesting microscopic particles remained.

Admiral Blandy ordered Colonel Warren to report to the support ship Wichita and explain his position to 1,400 skeptical officers and sailors. Some found him persuasive, but it was August 9 before he convinced Blandy. That was the date when Blandy realized, for the first time, that Geiger counters could not detect plutonium. Blandy was aware of the health problems of radium dial painters who ingested microscopic amounts of radium in the 1920s, and the fact that plutonium was assumed to have a similar biological effect. When plutonium was discovered in the captain's quarters of the Prinz Eugen, unaccompanied by fission products, Blandy realized that plutonium could be anywhere.

The following day, August 10, Warren showed Blandy an autoradiograph of a fish, an x-ray picture made by radiation coming from the fish. The outline of the fish was made by alpha radiation from the fish scales, evidence that plutonium, mimicking calcium, had been distributed throughout the fish, out to the scales. Blandy announced his decision, "then we call it all to a halt." He ordered that all further decontamination work be discontinued. Warren wrote home, "A self x ray of a fish . . . did the trick."

The decontamination failure ended plans to outfit some of the target ships for the 1947 Charlie shot and to sail the rest home in triumph. The immediate public relations problem was to avoid any perception that the entire target fleet had been destroyed. On August 6, in anticipation of this development, Blandy had told his staff that ships sunk or destroyed more than 30 days after the Baker shot "will not be considered as sunk by the bomb." By then, public interest in Crossroads was waning, and the reporters had gone home. The failure of decontamination did not make news until the final reports came out a year later.