LEGACY of BIKINI

 

I prefer to think of this inhuman event in human terms. In that regard, it was important not for when or why it was, because the “when” was mere connivance. M-hour was 7:15 A.M. local time, Saturday, 1 November, 1952.  But five hundred forty miles to the east at the same moment it was still Friday, 31 October 1952...Halloween.

The difference was the International Date Line (above),  drawn on paper across the not really empty emptiness of the Pacific Ocean.  The “why” is the simplest of the elements; because human egos were involved. So you see that ultimately the only important thing about the event is the humans it happened to; the people who lost their homes, the man who was not there, and the man who died.

The atoll of Enewetak was built upon a 60 million year old volcanic seamount which never reached the surface, but got close enough to it to provide a sunlit foundation for zillions of an almost microscopic creatures humans have called coral polyps. 

The polyps secrete a silicone exoskeleton...

...which are fed on by the sharp teeth of parrot fish, who pooped out white sand, which provides a foothold for aquatic plants behind the protected waters of built up coral reefs,  which hold the sand together long enough for some 40 bits of dry land to stay above sea level most of the year.  And when the coral dies their exoskeletons were left behind and eventually became limestone.

Humans arrived on “Aelon Kein Ad” (our islands) about 4,000 years ago. How and why humans made this improbably voyage remains a mystery. But since then,  the entire Enewetak atoll has proved the perseverance of corals and humanity.

Some how humans crossed hundreds of miles of open ocean to reach this tiny string of pearls -  just over 2 square miles in total of dry land, 200 yards across at it's widest point, with an average elevation of 5 feet above sea level, mostly on the east side of a 50 mile wide central lagoon. And somehow about 500 human beings at a time survived over two millennia in this place, enduring isolation, typhoons and droughts.

And somehow they survived the arrival of the Spanish in 1528, the British in 1788 (who renamed their home “The Marshall” Islands), the Germans in 1885, and the Japanese in 1915. However, in 1943, the Americans were attracted to the islands when the Japanese built an airstrip on the largest triangle of land in the atoll, called Engebi island. 

And somehow the native peoples even survived the Americans, who bombarded their island from the sea and the air and invaded it in February of 1944 (Operation Catchpole). In less than a week of fighting over three hundred Americans and two thousand six hundred Japanese died to claim possession of the various sand spits that made up the atoll of Enewetak. How many of the people who actually lived on the islands were killed in the battle was not recorded.  Nobody who cared about numbers bothered to ask about the native people until much later.In December of 1947 the Americans decided to use Enewetak to test their new atomic bombs. So the 141 of those natives who had survived the Battle of Enewetak were transported 140 miles east to Ujelang atoll.  It would be, the Americans assured them, a mere three year sojourn. But the nuclear explosions did not stop until 1958.

During those 12 years the people who had lived on three islands around Enewetak lagoon, were now crowded into a single village on a single island. Food was sometimes so short that coconuts, which were supposed to have been sold for copra, were instead eaten for survival.

Epidemics of polio and measles and rats plagued the village. As one woman told an ethnographer, “In those days, the wailing across the village was constant.” And always there was the paradise lost, an Eden that looked more perfect as memories of it faded. Even after 1958, when the last bomb exploded, the natives could not return home because the white sand beaches and coral rocks were too radioactive to be safe. What could have been worth this nightmare forced upon the people of Enewetak? Their nightmare was the dream of one man more than any other. Edward Teller (above) was an Hungarian born genius who was despised by most of his fellow scientists. In 1950 he aided and abetted the humiliation of his mentor, Robert Oppenheimer, by slyly suggesting that “Oppie”, who had overseen the invention and construction of the uranium fission bombs, could no longer be trusted with state secrets. Because of Teller’s secret testimony Oppenheimer was stripped of his security clearance and branded a traitor. Which he was not.

Oppemheimer’s actual crime seems to have been that he simply believed that Teller was over selling his design for the hydrogen fusion bomb, which was so big Teller referred to it as the "Super"..

Most scientists familiar with the subject agreed with Oppenheimer, including Stanislaw Ulam (above), a Polish-American mathematician, who in 1950 completed calculations that proved the design championed by Teller would never work. However Ulam did suggest there was a way “The Super” bomb could be built so that it would work.

Exactly what Ulam suggested is still classified. But Teller seized on that suggestion and pushed for the design to be tested as soon as possible.  The place chosen to test this new H-bomb was a distant speck, so far off in the Pacific Ocean that to most of the generals, admirals, scientists and politicians in Washington, it was not a real place. 

Teller himself never journeyed to Enewetak to supervise the construction of the device he had championed for six years because he “did not feel comfortable” at the test site, surrounded by his peers. So he did not have to look into the faces of the natives being ripped from their ancestral homes. 

Edward Teller did not have to watch the women carry their lives down to the boats that would transport them to a place they have never seen, One tropical island looks like every other, doesn't it? At least it does if you have never called a tropical island home. So, on Halloween night 1950, the ambitious Edward Teller monitored events on a seismograph 5,000 miles away, in a basement at the University of California at Berkley.

Meanwhile, on the tiny island of Elugelab (above, bottom), near the southeastern tip of the Enewetak atoll, the United States built an explosive device based on what was now called the “Teller-Ulam Concept”.

It was not a bomb. It was not a practical weapon, as it could not be "delivered". It was a proof of concept Rube Goldberg device,  nicknamed “The Sausage”.   It stood 20 feet tall and 22 feet long. It would never fit in a airplane's bomb bay. No rocket ever built would be able to lift it. It weighed  140,000 pounds, not counting the 24,000 pound refrigeration plant needed to chill the heavy hydrogen down to minus 417 degrees Fahrenheit, so that it would stay liquid long enough to allow it's atoms to fuse together more easily.

Officially the device was code named "Ivey Mike" (above), and it was serviced by 9,350 military and 2,300 civilian personnel. Eniwetok had never been so crowded. And it never would be again.

At precisely 7:14 and 59 and 4/10th seconds local time on the morning of 1 November, 1952 the device Ivy Mike was ignited by remote control from a ship 30 miles away.

Ivery Mike exploded with the force of  almost 10 and 1/2 million tons of TNT. That was bigger than had been anticipated. 

It sent 10 million tons of seawater and coral rocketing out of the lagoon. Waves 80 feet high raced outward, slowing dissipating until, at three miles they finally disappeared.

Within 90 seconds the fireball had reached 57,000 feet, where the mushroom cloud would eventually become 100 miles wide. 

The island of Elubelab (above, left center) simply evaporated.......leaving behind a crater 6,240 feet wide and 164 feet deep. This quickly filled with sea water.

(http://www.flickr.com/photos/32912172@N00/2924242774/)

One hour and forty minutes after Ivey Mike was ignited, four F-84 fighter jets (above), designated Pebble Red Flight,  entered the stem of the mushroom cloud at 42,000 feet, two at a time, to measure radiation levels. Each pilot wore a heavy lead lined “gown” for added protection against the gamma rays from cesium-137 and strontium-90 and alpha rays emitted by the plutonium-90 produced by the fusion.  At ground level, 20  miles from the point of ignition, a lethal dose radiation would be received within 25 minutes.

Upon entering the cloud at 42,000 feet the cockpit of Red One, flown by Lieutenant Colonel Virgil Meroney, was instantly bathed in a deep red glow. His “rad indicator” hit the peg – maxim radiation readings.

Worse, the rate indicator, which showed how quickly radiation was being accumulated, “went around like the sweep second hand of a watch.” Colonel Meroney immediately instructed his wing man in Red Two to follow him, and together they executed a 90 degree turn and flew back out of the cloud.

Red Three and Four were next to enter the cloud.  Very quickly Red Three returned. But from Red Four, flown by Lieutenant Jimmy Robinson (above) there was only silence. Then Robinson reported that he was at 20,000 feet, his autopilot having put him into a spin, and that his compass was out. 

Jimmy Robinson (above)  asked to be vectored to a B29 refueling tanker, but then reported  he had picked up the radio beacon from Enwetok air station, and was going to land there. He finally popped out of the mushroom cloud at 5,000 feet, saying he was now out of fuel and would have to bail out. He ejected his plexiglass canopy, but he never activated his ejection seat. 

A helicopter followed Robinson as he piloted Red Four into the lagoon,  about 3 ½ miles from the end of the runway. Hitting tail first, Robinson’s plane skipped 300 yards before slamming into the water nose first and flipped onto its back. 

It quickly sank in 175 feet of water, leaving an oil slick, a flight glove and some maps floating on the surface. The accident report suggested that the lead line apron may have prevented Robinson from getting out of the jet. Other than uncounted sea birds, fish, crabs, turtles and insects, his was the only death recorded that day.

Although told that divers had reached the wreckage of his F-84, neither his widow, Rebecca Robinson  nor her children were told if Jimmy's body was ever recovered, or why he  crashed.  Posthumously Jimmy Robinson was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross. It was pinned on Rebecca's chest (above).  But the family were never told if he or his plane was recovered from the Eniwetok lagoon. All details were and are still covered by the phrase, "National Security".

Edward Teller claimed he was burdened with the title “Father of the Hydrogen bomb”. Yet he based the rest of his life around it. He championed using hydrogen bombs to blast a harbor in Alaska and crushing petroleum out of Canadian oil sands. Later he was one of the primary champions who convinced President Ronald Reagan to push the infamous  and impractical "Star Wars Nuclear Defense System". None of Teller's ideas for civil uses of the hydrogen bomb were ever attempted. His star wars defense system was deemed unaffordable and unworkable, like his original design for the "Super" bomb.  Teller died in September of 2003, a controversial figure to the end of his life.

A quarter century after the U.S. government temporarily moved the people of Eniwetok, and sick of hearing unfulfilled promises, the 150 survivors finally appealed to the United Nations. An embarrassed American government then began, in the mid 1970’s, to scoop up the radioactive sand contaminated by the 30  thermonuclear bombs exploded on, above and under their atoll.

Some 95,000 cubic yards of radioactive debris were trucked to the most northern island on the atoll, the tiny islet of Runit.  There it was mixed with Portland Cement until it formed a mound 25 feet high. 

The original plan was to seal this radioactive material within a concrete tomb. This was then to be covered by an 18 inch cap of "clean" concrete. 

But financial constraints meant the containment dome would have no bottom. In other words, it has always been open to the sea. 

They labeled their work "The Cactus Dome" or "The Runit Dome"(above). In 1980 this tiny island was declared safe for human habitation again. But almost from day one cracks appeared in the dome, and by the turn of the 21st century, some were so large "...birds have laid eggs in them." 

 In fact the expensive 1970's clean up collected less than 1% of the total radioactive waste left on the atoll.  Despite this the natives of Enewetak were allowed to return.  The U.S. government built them houses (above) and even a town hall. The federal government even planted new coconut palm forest, in hopes of replacing the copra exports. But even without copra, the natives are doing better. Their boats catch fish every day. And they make a good living providing scuba diving tours of the war ships sunk in the lagoon by all those nuclear weapons.  

They enjoy American citizenship, but without access to social security or similar benefits. Today the natives peoples worry less about radiation than they do about rising sea levels. In fact, should The dome completely collapse tomorrow, their radiation exposure would not change significantly.

It wasn’t until fifty years later that the United States Department of Defense allowed the family of Jimmy Robinson to hold a memorial service and burial of an empty coffin in Arlington National Cemetery (above). His daughter, Rebecca “Becky” Miller, works for a Veterans organization but has been told that officially her father was not a casualty of the cold war, and so the family has never received the benefits due them . As a web site notes, "In reality, Jimmy Robinson remains lost because his own government …has chosen to abandon him.”And that, along with the spending of $9.6 trillion dollars in the entire effort on  Enewetak, remains the American legacy of nuclear weapons. That and 75 years of no nuclear wars. 

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A HOLE IN THE HEAD

 

I suppose there are a hundred measures by which to assess the history of Phineas P. Gage. The most unlikely might be the field of phrenology, which held that just as a lifetime of muscular exertion leaves evidence on the leg and arm bones, mental endeavors - personality, intelligence and emotions - leave tell-tale imprints on the top of the skull: or so the theory went. 

Practitioners, like the American Orsen Squire Fowler (above), would run their fingers over the bumps on your head and divine your occupation, your character flaws, even why you were having trouble sleeping. 

But as profitable as the business was, even Fowler acknowledged, "....phrenology is either fundamentally true or else untrue..." - a statement which, standing alone,  is undoubtedly true. The ultimate disproof of phrenology would be provided by the words Pheneas P. Gage.

Phineas was originally an Egyptian title, meaning a dark or bronze skinned oracle. He first appears in the Old Testament  (Numbers 25, verses 7-8), as a priest's son who spies the Hebrew prince Zimri entering the Tabernacle with a Midianite woman. In a fit of offended religious passion, Phineas runs them both through with a spear. For this double murder, Moses rewards Phineas. His namesake may have paid the price for that excess of zeal.

His family name was English, which actually means it came from the French spoken in Normandy in 1066.  This Old French was mostly based on the everyday language spoken by Roman soldiers. In their Vulgate Latin a "jalle" was a measure of liquid, equal to our gallon, and a "jalgium" was the stick or rod inserted into the amphora to measure how much wine was left. Over centuries the pronunciation became a "gaunger" later shortened to "gauge". Thus a gauge is a standard of measurement. And by a happy coincidence, that describes Phineas Gage perfectly - an oracle of measurement.

In 1823 Phineas P. Gage was born in the southern New Hampshire village of Lebanon. He grew into a strikingly handsome young man, and a natural leader.  The doctor for the Burlington and Rutland Railroad,  physician John Martlyn Harlow, described Phineas as "...a perfectly healthy, strong active young man, 25 years of age...5 feet 6 inches tall...150 pounds...having had scarcely a day's illness...." 

Navies were members of the work teams - inland navigators -  who laid out the path of railroads crossing the land. The weak steam engines of the day could climb or descend no more than a 1 1/2 % grade, or rise 18 inches for every foot forward.  Any obstacles to this would have to be blasted out of the way.  But it was worth the effort because of the money that could be made from transporting resources by rail.

In 1825 Englishman George Stephenson's locomotive "The Rocket" (above) took less than two hours to haul 36 wagons of loaded with coal, nine miles from the mine to the docks on the River Tees. His steam locomotive was not only a revolution in speed, but also reduced transportation costs by two thirds. 

Competitors literally followed in Stephenson's tracks. George had set his new rails four feet eight and one-half inches apart because that was the "gauge" of the old rails used when the wagons were pulled by horses. And by decree of the royal commission of 1845, that would be the "Standard Gauge" for Britain, and eventually most of the rest of the world.

Just three years later, on Wednesday, 13 September, 1848 a Rutland and Burlington Railroad construction crew, headed by the 25 year-old foreman Phineas P. Gage, was preparing a road bed outside of the little mill town of Cavendish, Vermont. Each member had a simple job, which is to say their collective task was a technically complicated jigsaw puzzle of mundane occupations, which when combined in a specific order, changed the world. 

In this case, an engineer would determine where rock was to be removed. Team members would then pound a drill into the rock, creating a hole.  As foreman, Phineas Gage would then pour a measure of black powder into the hole. Then he would pour a measure of sand on top of the powder. Then Phineas would insert a fuse through the sand and into the powder. 

Then he would drop a 35 pound, three and a-half foot long iron tamping rod (above), sharpened at one end,  into the hole to compact the charge and sand. Finally, Phineas would light the fuse.

After the resulting explosion (above), other workers with shovels and carts would remove the broken rock while the foreman engineer would determine where the next charge should be placed.

Toward the end of a had day's work, the team had just about finished clearing a curved cut through a granite outcrop (above). At just about 4:30pm, Phineas ordered his weary drilling team to take cover yet again.  

Again Phineas poured black powder into the drill hole. But this time, in his haste or wearyness,  he forgot to add enough sand. So when he shoved down the iron tamping rod down the hole, it sparked against the granite. And without the insulating sand, that set off the black powder.

There was a bright flash and a sharp loud crack. 

In something less than one second, the 35 pound rod was driven out of the hole, penetrating just below Gage's left cheek bone, destroying his left eye, plowing through his brain and blasting out the top of his skull. 

The tamping rod landed 80 feet away, smeared in blood and brain matter..

As the smoke cleared, the startled crew rushed to Phineas' assistance. They found him awake and alert, but in great pain. 

With assistance Phineas was loaded aboard an ox cart, and suffered a jarring forty-five minute long, three quarters of a mile ride back to the Adams Hotel in Cavendish. During the ride Phineas called for his work book and made notes concerning the days progress. Once back at the hotel, Phineas was was placed in a chair on the front porch.

An hour local doctor, Edward Williams,  arrived. "I first noticed the wound," wrote the good doctor, "before I alighted from my carriage, the pulsations of the brain being very distinct."  The doctor recorded that his patient had a pulse of 60, was breathing regularly and his pupils were reactive. He reported no pain. "Mr. Gage...was relating the manner in which he was injured to the bystanders," wrote Dr. Williams, ".(and then) got up and vomited; the effort...pressed out about half a teacup full of the brain, which fell upon the floor."

The tamping rod had performed a frontal lobotomy on Phineas Gage's brain, disconnecting that part of his mind which dealt with "....future consequences... chooses between good and bad actions... (and) override(s) and suppress unacceptable social responses..." (Wikapedia - "Frontal Lobe"). 

Severing the neural connections with the frontal lobe causes patients to  "...not respond to imaginary situations, rules, or plans for the future..." and who tend to be  "...unusually aggressive ".  And in the case of Phineas Gage, he tended to ".. use puns a lot." In other words, Phineas Gage was a new gauge of the human brain.

About 6:00 pm a company doctor, John Martyn Harlow (above) arrived and took over treatment of the unusual young patient.

http://www.psywww.com/intropsych/ch02_human_nervous_system/lobotomy_effects.html

To no one's surprise, the company doctor decided the young man with the hole in his head could be quickly released from care. And despite several setbacks, Dr. Harlow deemed Phineas able to travel the thirty miles to his mother's home, in Lebanon, New Hampshire for Christmas in 1848.  

He returned to Cavendish in April of 1849, and Dr. John Harlow noted "his physical health is good, and I am inclined to say he has recovered. Has no pain in (his) head, but says it has a queer feeling which he is not able to describe."

Phineas never worked as a "navvie" again. Briefly he tried selling his story via public speaking engagements, and displaying the very rod (above) which had passed through his brain. 

But handsome though he still was, that career never suited him. Despite rumors that he appeared in P.T. Barnum's museum in New York, there is no evidence he ever did. Instead, in 1851, he found a job at the Hannover Inn in Dartmouth, New Hampshire, as a stable hand and coach driver.  Perhaps he found animals a better gauge of Gage than humans. 

Then in 1854 he moved to driving for another stage line , this time in Valparaiso, Chile (above). He took with him his "constant companion", that iron tamping rod. 

Phineas held down his new job for seven years, driving the 70 miles up and down the steep mountain roads (above) between Valparaiso, and Santiago. That would seem to me to be a far longer than you would expect from an unpredictable violent man, as Phineas was described in later medical texts. But I suspect those are just inventions based on old wives' tales. But one of the occasional side effects of a frontal lobotomy are seizures caused by scar tissue within the brain. And those now began to plague Phineas.

In 1859 Phineas rejoined his mother, sister and her husband, who were now living in California. He got a job as a farm hand in Santa Clara County (above), at the southern end of San Francisco Bay. But the seizures got worse, and on 21 May, 1860,  Phineas Gauge died of what the doctors called complications of epilepsy, six months short of twelve years after he forgot to load enough sand atop the black powder.

Phineas Gage died just as the American Civil War was exploding. Over the next four years the number of survivors with similar brain injuries multiplied. 

Doctors now had patients and skulls aplenty to examine, and upon reflection they reached several conclusions. First, it was clear that the bumps on the top of the head had no connection to anything going on inside the skull. Phrenology was bunk. But the disabilities of various head wound survivors (above) was proof that different sections of the brain did perform different functions.

And third, the old adage that medicine is the search for profit after death, was confirmed when in 1866, the ex-company Doctor John Harlow convinced (paid?) Phineas' sister and brother-in-law to disinter Phineas just long enough to chop off his head and ship the skull and the infamous tamping rod back to Boston. 

There Doctor Harlow used the skull as an exhibit in his second (and more colorful) paper on his most famous patient.  It was this paper which enlarged on the stories of his post accident temper and use of profanities. But there can also be no doubt that even after his death Phineas reset the gauge for our understanding of brain injuries.

A 2012 study by Harvard University determined the iron rode had "...destroyed approximately 11% of the white matter in Gage's frontal lobe and 4% of his cerebral cortex".  However, this study did our hero no good whatsoever. The story of Phineas P. Gage can thus serve as a parable of the dangers in being in the forefront of medical science.

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