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The Bravo Test and the Death and Life of the Global Ecosystem in the Early Anthropocene

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 March 2025

Robert Jacobs
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On March 1st 1954 the United States tested its first deliverable hydrogen bomb at Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands. The weapon yielded a force three times as large as its designers had planned or anticipated. The radioactive fallout cloud that resulted from the weapon would kill a fisherman located 100 km away, cause illness in hundreds and perhaps thousands of people across hundreds of miles, and contaminate entire atolls with high levels of radiation displacing residents most of whom have never been able to return to their homes. Slowly it would become evident that, while this weapon had been tested in the Marshall Islands, its detonation was a global event.

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Research Article
Information
Asia-Pacific Journal , Volume 13 , Issue 29 , July 2015 , e1
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This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is unaltered and is properly cited. The written permission of Cambridge University Press must be obtained for commercial re-use or in order to create a derivative work.
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Copyright © The Authors 2015

References

Notes

1 Richard G. Hewitt and Jack M. Holl, Atoms for Peace and War, 1953-1961: Eisenhower and the Atomic Energy Commission (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989): 174.

2 Toshihiro Higuchi, “Atmospheric Nuclear Weapon Testing and the Debate on Risk Knowledge in Cold War America,” in, J. R. McNeill and Corinna R. Unger, eds., Environmental Histories of the Cold War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010): 301-322.

3 This theme can be seen in mainstream popular culture texts by the end of the 1950s. The book, and then Hollywood film On the Beach depicted isolated survivors of a global nuclear war in Melbourne, Australia awaiting the inevitable arrival of lethal levels of radiation. See, Nevil Shute, On the Beach (New York: William Morrow and Co., 1957); On the Beach, dir. and prod. Stanley Kramer *(United Artists, 1959).

4 Kunkle, Thomas and Byron Ristvet, Castle Bravo: Fifty Years of Legend and Lore: A Guide to Offsite Radiation Exposures. DTRIAC SR-12-001. Kirtland, NM: Defense Threat Reduction Agency, 2013: 54.

5 “Tell How Atom Bomb Turned Sand to Glass,” Chicago Daily Tribune (September 12, 1945): 1.

6 Richard Tanter, “Voice and Silence in the First Nuclear War: Wilfred Burchett and Hiroshima,” The Asia-Pacific Journal (August 11, 2005).

7 Wilfred Burchett, “The Atomic Plague: I Write this as a Warning to the World,” Daily Express (Sept. 5, 1945), p. 1. American journalist Amy Goodman has long advocated stripping the New York Times and its reporter William Laurence of their 1946 Pulitzer Prize for reporting about the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki since Laurence was at the time on the Pentagon payroll and should be viewed as a military spokesperson rather than as a journalist. See Amy Goodman, “Hiroshima Cover-up: Stripping the War Department's Timesman of his Pulitzer,” Democracy Now! (August 5, 2005) (accessed October 17, 2015). See also, Beverly Ann Deepe Keever, News Zero: The New York Times and the Bomb (Monroe, ME: Common Courage Press, 2004).

8 Susan Lindee, Suffering Made Real: American Science and the Survivors at Hiroshima (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994): 17-55, 143-165.

9 United States, Army Pictorial Center, “The Atom Soldier,” The Big Picture (1955). This episode of the popular U.S. Army television show was filmed at the Nevada Test Site in January 1955 during Operation Teapot. The deceit in this statement is around what constitutes “fatal” in gamma levels. In Hiroshima and Nagasaki those within one mile experienced gamma ray doses that would lead to death within hours or days. Those beyond one mile still experienced levels that could be fatal, but in weeks or months.

10 Ibid.

11 Holly M. Barker, Bravo for the Marshallese: Regaining Control in a Post-Nuclear, Post-Colonial World (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 2004): 17-20.

12 Rose Gottemoeller, “Remarks at the Republic of Marshall Islands Nuclear Remembrance Day” (March 1, 2014) The anniversary of the Bravo test, March 1st, is a national holiday in the Republic of the Marshall Islands known as Nuclear Victims and Survivors Remembrance Day.

13 Barton C. Hacker, Elements of Controversy: The Atomic Energy Commission and Radiation Safety in Nuclear Weapons Testing, 1947-1974 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994): 180-184.

14 Malgosia Fitzmaurice, Contemporary Issues in International Environmental Law (Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2009): 154.

15 Fission weapons are based on the principle of splitting an atom and releasing the energy in the nucleus. Fusion weapons mimic the physical process by which stars burn nuclear fuel and fuse two atoms together. Fission weapons are often referred to as A-bombs, while fusion weapons are referred to as H-bombs, or thermonuclear weapons. Thermonuclear weapons are thousands of times more powerful than fission bombs.

16 Atoms for Peace and War, 1953-196, 182.

17 Richard J. Hewlett and Jack M. Holl, Atoms for Peace and War, 1953-1961: Eisenhower and the Atomic Energy Commission (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989): 181.f an article first published in the of an article first published in targets before an attack)ng Ground, however this 14% accou

18 Mark Schreiber, “Lucky Dragon's Lethal Catch,” The Japan Times (March 18, 2012) (accessed July 16, 2015): Samuel Glasstone, ed., The Effects of Nuclear Weapons (Washington DC: US Government Printing Office, 1962): 460-64; “‘Missing’ Documents Reveal 1954 U.S. H-bomb Test Affected 556 More Ships,” Mainichi Shimbun (September 20, 2014) (accessed 28 October 2014).

19 Ralph Lapp, The Voyage of the Lucky Dragon (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1957).

20 Lapp, The Voyage of the Lucky Dragon; Oishi Matashichi, The Day the Sun Rose in the West: Bikini, The Lucky Dragon, and I (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2011).

21 Robert Jacobs, The Dragon's Tail: Americans Face the Atomic Age (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2010): 30.

22 See for example, “Warship Showers Off ‘Fallout,‘” Popular Science (January 1957): 151.

23 Jacob Hamblin, ‘“A Dispassionate and Objective Effort:‘ Negotiating the First Study on the Biological Effects of Atomic Radiation,” Journal of the History of Biology 40 (2007): 147-177.

24 A. Constandina Titus, Bombs in the Backyard: Atomic Testing and American Politics (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 1986): 17-18.

25 Bravo for the Marshallese, 17-19.

26 Jonathan M. Weisgall, Operation Crossroads: The Atomic Tests at Bikini Atoll (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1994).

27 David Bradley, No Place to Hide (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1948).

28 “The Evaluation of the Atomic Bomb as a Military Weapon,” June 30, 1947. JCS 1691/3, 57-89.

29 Jacobs, The Dragons Tail, 84-98.

30 Gregg Herken, Counsels of War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1984): 103.

31 Robert Jacobs, “Military Nationalism and Nuclear Internationalism in Asia,” in Jeff Kingston, ed., Asian Nationalisms (New York: Routledge Press, 2015) forthcoming.

32 David Holloway, Stalin and the Bomb: The Soviet Union and Atomic Energy, 1939-1956 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994): 213-223.

33 Department of State, FRUS, 1949 Vol. I, National Security Affairs, Foreign Economic Policy (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1976): 481-482.

34 Michele Stenehjem Gerber, On the Home Front: The Cold War Legacy of the Hanford Nuclear Site (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1992), pp. 31-53.

35 David Rosenberg, “The Origins of Overkill: Nuclear Weapons and American Strategy, 1945-1960,” International Security 7:4 (Spring 1983): 16-17.

36 Lynn Eden has written a devastating critigue of leaving out assessments of the fires created from nuclear detonations and war planning in, Lynn Eden, Whole World on Fire: Organizations, Knowledge, and Nuclear Weapons Devastation (New Delhi: Manas Publications, 2004).

37 Herken, Counsels of War, 62.

38 Quoted in David Rosenberg, “A Smoking, Radiating Ruin at the End of Two Hours: Documents on American War Plans for Nuclear War with the Soviet Union, 1954-55,” International Security 6:3 (Winter 1981/82): 25.

39 Rosenberg, “The Origins of Overkill,” 19.

40 Ibid. 7.

41 Ibid., 51.

42 Ibid., 51.

43 Eric Schlosser, Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident and the Illusion of Safety (New York: Penguin Press, 2013): 245-7.

44 Peter Pringle and William Arkin, SIOP: The Secret U.S. Plan for Nuclear War (New York: W.W. Norton, 1983); Lawrence Freedman, The Evolution of Nuclear Strategy (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1981): 245.

45 Counsels of War, p. 138. See also, Fred Kaplan, The Wizards of Armageddon (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1983): 270-2.

46 Atoms for Peace and War, 345.

47 Morrison, Philip and Paul Walker. “A Primer of Nuclear Warfare.” In, Jack Dennis, ed. The Nuclear Almanac: Confronting the Atom in War and Peace. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, 1983): 153.

48 Herbert York, Race to Oblivion: A Participant's View of the Arms Race (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1970): 75-105, 173-187.

49 Jacobs, The Dragon's Tail, pp. 1-11; Robert Jacobs, “Whole Earth or No Earth: The Origins of the Whole Earth Icon in the Ashes of Hiroshima and Nagasaki,” The Asia-Pacific Journal Volume 9, Issue 13, Number 5 (28 March 2011)

50 William Souder, On a Farther Shore: The Life and Legacy of Rachel Carson, Author of Silent Spring (New York: Crown, 2012), pp. 233-34; “Radioactive Fish May Move Over Wide Area of Pacific,” Sydney Morning Herald (25 November 1954): 2; Spencer R. Weart, The Rise of Nuclear Fear (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012): 98-9.

51 Sevitt, S. “The Bombs,” The Lancet 269 (July 23, 1955): 199-201. Map drawn by Y. Nishiwaki.

52 The event happened in 1953 but was not publicly reported until 1954. See, Herbert Clark, “The Occurrence of Unusually High-Level Radioactive Rainout in the Area of Troy, N.Y.,” Science (May 7, 1954): 619-22.

53 Richard L. Miller, Under the Cloud: The Decades of Nuclear Testing (The Woodlands, TX: Two-Sixty Press, 1991), p. 197; see also, Harvey Wasserman and Norman Solomon, Killing Our Own: The Disaster of America's Experience with Atomic Radiation (New York: Dell, 1982): 92-3.

54 “United States Nuclear Tests, July 1945 through September 1992,” Federation of American Scientists (accessed 28 October 2014).

55 Available online at, Project Sunshine: Worldwide Effects of Atomic Testing (Santa Monica: RAND, 1956) (accessed 28 October 2014).

56 Sue Rabbitt Roff, “Project Sunshine and the Slippery Slope: The Ethics of Tissue Sampling for Strontium-90,” Medicine, Conflict and Survival 18:3 (2001): 299-310.

57 See, “Australian Strontium-90 Testing Program 1957-1978,” Australian Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety Report: Reprinted here (accessed 28 October 2014)

58 1962 was the peak year in which the United States tested a total of 92 nuclear weapons, with another two tested collaboratively by the United States and the United Kingdom. See, “United States Nuclear Tests, July 1945 through September 1992,” Federation of American Scientists.

59 Paul Boyer, Fallout: A Historian Reflects on America's Half-Century Encounter with Nuclear Weapons (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1998), pp. 82-4; Lawrence S. Wittner, Rebels Against War: The American Peace Movement 1941-1960 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969): 241-56.

60 Benjamin Spock, Dr. Spock's Common Sense Book on Baby and Child Care (New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1946).

61 Milton S. Katz, Ban the Bomb: A History of SANE, the Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy (New York: Praeger, 1986): 65-83.

62 Ban the Bomb, 78.

63 Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1962). See also, Eliza Griswold, “The Wild Life of Silent Spring,” New York Times (September 23, 2012): MM36.

64 James Lovelock, Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979. See also, Michael Ruse, The Gaia Hypothesis: Science on a Pagan Planet (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013). Carson's book was a key text that presaged Lovelock's work, as were the works on the concept of “Spaceship Earth” by Buckminster Fuller, and Barry Commoner's The Closing Circle. See, Buckminster Fuller, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1968). Barry Commoner, The Closing Circle: Nature, Man & Technology (New York: Random House, 1971);

65 Jacobs, “Whole Earth or No Earth.” See also, Andrew G. Kirk, Counterculture Green: The Whole Earth Catalog and American Environmentalism (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2007).

66 Elizabeth M. DeLoughrey, “The Myth of Isolates: Ecosystem Ecologies in the Nuclear Pacific,” Cultural Geographies 20:2 (2007), pp. 167-184; Laura A. Bruno, “The Beguest of the Nuclear Battlefield: Science, Nature, and the Atom During the First Decade of the Cold War,” Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences 33:2 (2003): 237-259.