Atomic Soldiers: Training for the Final War

Jim Dangerfield:
One of the things that a lot of people have said is that all the troops were notified about what they were going to be doing. Well, I wasn't told, I was just sitting on a bus and off we went

Lisa Perry:
Jim Dangerfield was a young soldier in the US Army when an unanticipated bus ride in the Spring of 1957 would deliver him to Camp Desert Rock, Nevada.

Jim Dangerfield
When we got there, we were still told nothing. This sergeant said that, um, the next morning we're gonna be going through something and you'll know about it when I tell you. So they woke us up at 3:30. He said, here's, here's what you're going to do. You have to lay in your bunk, put your head down as far as you can into your mattress. If you can get a pillow over it, fine. If you can get your hand over your eyes, do that too. And we thought, well, this is very strange, but that's what the man said to do. That's what we did.

And then I heard a countdown. And when it hits zero, this light, which is indescribable, there's no way I can describe it. I could see all my bones, I could see veins, I could see everything. And it was like I was X-raying my hands. That put the fear of God in me.  And then the sergeant said, okay, everybody up, said this is an atomic bomb and this is why you're here.

Lisa Perry:
I'm Lisa Perry, and you’re listening to At The Brink, a podcast about the dangers of nuclear weapons and the stories of those fighting to protect us. In the first two episodes of this season, we heard how a decade of atmospheric nuclear testing indirectly exposed countless American citizens to radioactive fallout. But there is another group of Americans who were directly and knowingly exposed to radiation from these tests. During the 1950s, the US military was feverishly trying to prepare to fight the next war, which they believed would be fought with nuclear weapons. And you couldn't fight an atomic war without atomic soldiers. Nearly half a million American servicemen were compelled to participate in above ground nuclear testing exercises at close range in an effort to learn how soldiers would react on the atomic battlefield. In today's episode, we talked with some of the surviving atomic veterans. You'll hear how it felt to witness an atomic detonation, how servicemen were prevented from talking about their experiences, and how they have grappled with the fallout for the rest of their lives.

To get a clear understanding of why many of these difficult decisions were made, I asked Alex Wellerstein to color in the details of how we ushered in the Atomic Age.

Alex Wellerstein:
I am Alex Wellerstein. I am an Associate Professor of Science and Technology Studies at the Stevens Institute of Technology, and I'm a historian of nuclear weapons. So in the 1950s, the US nuclear arsenal becomes incredibly diverse. They start being able to do all sorts of interesting things. 1946, they had blown up some boats with Operation Crossroads. Now they want to know all sorts of things. What about bunkers? What about houses? What about tanks? They're also very interested in what soldiers would do if they see nuclear weapons going off, do they still follow orders or do they panic and start running around like chickens with their heads cut off? Can you train a soldier to stare down a mushroom cloud and still do what you tell them to do? Because they're imagining nuclear war is not being this sort of apocalypse where suddenly the bombs go off and the world ends. They see it as something awful that they could recover from if they plan for it. So you just start getting lots and lots and lots of nuclear tests, not just to develop these new weapons, which they're doing at the same time, but to prepare for using them and having them used against them.

Lisa Perry:
Although the military was treating these weapons as simply bigger bombs with which to wage war, they were well aware that nuclear bombs added an entirely different level of risk. A risk they believed was worth taking for the greater goal of national security.

Alex Wellerstein:
Scientists had understood that radiation could be pretty detrimental by the 1940s, and they knew from the very beginning of the Manhattan Project that these would be among the most radioactive things that you could create. They didn't have a great sense of long-term effects. They know that if you expose somebody to high levels of radiation, they'll get real sick. The hair will fall out and they'll die. It's really these sort of lower level, chronic level exposures of radiation that they have the most uncertainty about. They generally, and I think earnestly believed that they were not putting these people in significant risk. And even if they worried a little bit about that, they could say, well, we're saving the free world here.

Lisa Perry:
The military justified the risks as necessary to defend the country, but most soldiers had no idea just how dangerous their participation really was.

Alex Wellerstein:
In retrospect, it's very clear that many of the people involved in this are not being told very much about what's going on. The military attitude is we don't have to tell you anything. And even if we did, would you understand it grunt? I mean, were you gonna, you know what a gamma ray is, right? You know what beta burns are? Probably not, right.

Lisa Perry:
Those grunts would soon learn about the reality of nuclear weapons up close and personal. One such grunt was Specialist Fourth Class, Jim Dangerfield. And yes, that's his real name.

Jim Dangerfield:
Well, my official name is Howard James Dangerfield, but I prefer Jim. With a name Dangerfield, you wanna shorten it up somewhere.

Lisa Perry:
You heard Jim describe his very first experience witnessing an atomic detonation at the top of the show, but that would be far from his last. From May to October of 1957, Jim was stationed at Camp Desert Rock, Nevada for a series of nuclear tests called Operation Plumbbob

Jim carries himself with a casual laid-back ease from meeting him, you probably would never guess that he's one of the few surviving witnesses to the greatest destructive force known to mankind. He recounted the harrowing stories of his past from the breakfast nook of his home, as his wife made breakfast in the kitchen.

Jim Dangerfield:
I observed or participated in all 29 of the shots. There were times where you would just go out and you would be eight miles away from ground zero and you would observe the bomb. And, and other times we'd actually be participating, we'd be in the trenches itself and the bomb would go off, and then you would march through ground zero. Later on, they were told in the debriefing that you see what a wonderful experience this was. I mean, I actually read the script and this is a wonderful experience. Here you are six hours later and, no problem. So you can survive a nuclear attack and still be able to attack the enemy. That was the whole premise of all the testing from 1951 on. And that's what every soldier was told. They were told it was beautiful. I saw nothing beautiful about it.

Lisa Perry:
Between 1951 and 1962, the US carried out 11 different atomic test series at the Nevada test site and nine at the Pacific Proving Ground. These series had names like Ranger, Teapot and Plumbbob, and each series consisted of between two and 44 individual tests, also called shots. Of the 29 shots Jim Dangerfield participated in, one in particular remains vivid in his mind.

Jim Dangerfield:
Let me describe Shot Smokey. This was the last shot in the series of shots for Operation Plumbbob. And this one was an important one because it was the largest tower shot that had been done since 1951, around 55 kilotons. Putting that in perspective, Hiroshima was 14 kilotons, so it was a powerful bomb.

Lisa Perry:
Jim's company commander had volunteered Jim and three members of his squadron for a special experiment as part of Shot Smokey. The morning of the test, Jim and his team dressed in their standard issue army fatigues. They walked out to their jeep, started the engine, and drove off into the desert, directly towards the bomb tower.

Jim Dangerfield:
When we got there, I know I looked up and I saw the tower and I saw the bomb. It seemed like it was right on top of us. And next to us were people from Lawrence Livermore Lab, and they were in hazmat suits. We were told there that had been a problem. I don't like to ever hear the word, there's a problem, particularly problem in atomic bomb. And the issue was the weather. The guys in the suits said that the wind is coming up and we gotta get this shot off. And then when that bomb goes off, you have 120 seconds, get back in that Jeep and get outta here, as fast as you can. Cuz he said all that radiation and all the dust and all that, it will come right at us. Of course, they're in suits and all that. I had nothing but a, you know, my fatigue hat. They did give us goggles for the first time, goggles like you would go diving or something in the water. I turned to my company commander and I said, you know, are we supposed to be out here? He said, well, I volunteered us. I thought we'd be standing way back with the other troops that were in the trenches. I didn't realize that we were this close to the bottom. He said, I think we made a mistake.

Lisa Perry:
But in the military, orders are orders and the test was going to happen, whether they agreed to participate or not. Preparation for the test followed the typical routine. Jim turned his back to the testing site. He put his hands over his eyes and he waited for the countdown to begin.

Jim Dangerfield:
You know, it's A minus 10, 8, nine. And, um, then the, all of a sudden the flash was 10 times greater than anything I had ever experienced before. It's hard to describe it. It was blinding, absolutely blinding. All the other shots I experienced, all the thing in the mattress and all that, doesn't even begin to compare with what happened. It was enough to scare me for most of my life. There was no sound. And that's always the eerie part of this. And as we were standing there, I didn't realize the shock wave was coming, and I should have, but I didn't. And I was thrown back at least 20 yards. I actually went up in the air. Of course, by this time I thought, you know, we're not gonna survive this. Because all of a sudden I could see the dust cloud and all that coming at us, realizing that we had to be out of there.

Lisa Perry:
Amidst the chaos, Jim and his crew knew that they needed to get away from the descending cloud of radioactive fallout as soon as possible. But escape proved more difficult than they had anticipated.

Jim Dangerfield:
We couldn't get the Jeep started. That was the funny part of it. We kept pounding on the Jeep driver's head and said, get this thing started. He couldn't get the ignition going. Then he flooded it. And so, you know, we're getting close to that 120 seconds. We got out. We go back to camp, and of course they're giving the regular lecture. But before we did that, for us, they said, we're gonna have to decontaminate you. Well, fine. But I don't know what that meant. Cause that word has never come out before. I thought, well, maybe take a shower, take off your clothes. They handed us brooms and I broomed the company commander, company commander broomed me. And we can imagine all that radiation dust coming off. And that was it. That was our decontamination.

Lisa Perry:
The military was knowledgeable about radiological decontamination methods, but most efforts to implement such protocols were laughable at best. They were more focused on demonstrating immediate survivability than they were worried about long-term impacts for soldiers.

Jim Dangerfield:
They were experimenting that we could actually survive a nuclear attack and we could walk through ground zero and we could basically be at war. And it was being no problems. The atomic bomb is survivable. That was Operation PlumbBob.

Lisa Perry:
Although on the surface there appeared to be no problems, underneath many atomic veterans walked away from the experience shaken to their core.

Jim Dangerfield:
During these tests, I saw generals, battle hardened generals, Marine generals, Army colonels in tears, literally in tears. I had one general that I had to actually help up. He was yelling and he kept saying, they lied to me. And I've lied to my troops. And he said, this is terrible. I had a colonel tell me, this is the worst thing he's ever been through in his lifetime. And this is a guy that was in D-Day.

Lisa Perry:
Some 18,000 servicemen were exposed to nuclear radiation during Operation PlumBob. Although they survived the tests, for many, the seeds of illness had already been planted. Jim counts himself lucky compared to how his fellow soldiers fared in the years afterwards. But the tests left a deep impression on him. And to this day, he still struggles with how to describe the horror of what he witnessed in that desert.

Jim Dangerfield:
Awesome. Scary. Never wanna see it again. I, I I, I don't know. I, there's something you just don't want to see. It is like, I, it's hard for me to describe it. I, you know, 64 years, I still think of it as like a monster because it's not like any other bomb you've ever seen. I've been around a lot of explosives when I was in the services. This is far beyond that. And of course then I remember in my mind, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and I'm thinking, wait a minute, that destroyed whole cities. And we're sitting out here with bombs that were 10 times what hit Nagasaki and Hiroshima. And putting the troops through that.

Lisa Perry:
They say, the devil you know is better than the devil you don't. Of course, while Jim would've preferred to never have faced such a monster, at least he had some idea of what he had experienced. Many servicemen were told almost nothing about the testing operation. One of those soldiers was Hank Bolden.

Hank Bolden:
My full name is Henry Bolden. My rank at the time of this event was, I was a PFC, which is Private First Class. I knew I was going on temporary duty. That's all they tell you, temporary duty. They didn't go into the specifics of what is gonna be involved. You didn't even know what it was all about, even while you were participating in it. It was only in my case, years after that, I finally found out what it was that I participated in.

Lisa Perry:
When Hank joined the military, he didn't have any particular dreams of being a soldier. Growing up as a teenager in New York, military service was more of a means to an end for a young man looking for some direction.

Hank Bolden:
I thought it was a macho thing to do, really. You know, I went down to the draft board with a friend of mine to do the paperwork for his entering into the military. And while I'm sitting in the waiting area waiting for him, one of the soldiers came out and asked me did I want to join the army. So I said, yeah, you know, big smile. Yes. I did not know at the time that he had to be 17 or, or whatever, you know. So I said, yes.

Lisa Perry:
At just 16 years old, Hank would fudge his birth certificate in order to join the ranks while still underage. After joining, Hank would be dismayed at the hostile environment he faced as a black enlisted man in the US military of the 1950s.

Hank Bolden:
I went in, in 1955. And, those hardened attitudes that a lot of folks were still inherent with them. In my outfit was 800 people and there was 13 blacks, and we were not too thrilled with how they treat you. And being from the north, I was not used to certain things that they try to have you do, the way that they talk to you. And at that time, I was a, pretty muscular guy. I used to box and wrestle, you know, so fighting and all that was right up my line, so I stayed in a lot of trouble. I got punished a lot because of that. And I also think that's one of the reasons why I was selected to be one of the persons that was sent to Desert Rock and just to get me out of their hair. That may not be the reason, but that was just my thought.

Lisa Perry:
After one such scrap, Hank would be ordered from his normal duty station in California to camp Desert Rock, Nevada, with no idea of what he was about to face. He didn't even learn the name of the operation he was involved in until decades later.

Hank Bolden:
At the time I was stationed at Desert Rock, Nevada, my segment was Operation Teapot, Shot Wasp, like a wasp, W A S P.

Lisa Perry:
Operation Teapot was a series of 14 tests conducted in early 1955. The goal was for ground forces to practice different tactics on a nuclear battlefield. Shot WASP involved moving a group of soldiers, including Hank, to 3000 feet from ground zero while the mushroom cloud was still forming.

Hank Bolden:
The testing was the 18th of February, 1955. They don't tell you what's going to happen. You know, you just go in and you’re assigned to a barracks and that's it. And then comes nighttime is when you’re ordered to gather together and march out to a trench

Lisa Perry:
With only these limited instructions to follow, Hank joined his temporary outfit in the cold winter desert to wait and watch from the trenches.

Hank Bolden:
They did tell you about a countdown happening. And just wait for the countdown, and the red lights are flashing. And later you're, you hear this big blast. And you actually see the bones in your hands from the radiation exposure. And at that point, you still don't know what happened. You just know that something happened, you know, and you're there without any protective gear, you know, just your helmet, you know, but no goggles, no face mask, or then they, you know, give you a broom, a regular broom. And with that broom, you're supposed to brush one another or brush the dust off. And there's still no thought of what, what you're doing, why you're doing it.

Lisa Perry:
For Hank, who was only 17 years old, when he unknowingly witnessed an atomic detonation, the experience felt more like a lark than a scare.

Hank Bolden:
It's like another thrill, you know, it's like going to Disney World. It was excitement, real life excitement.

Lisa Perry:
Beyond the spectacle of the detonation, there was something else unusual Hank experienced that day in the desert

Hank Bolden:
In my trench now, everyone in there was black, so all I seen was black faces. And truthfully, even though there was white faces, exposed, when I was there, I never saw one. Even my superiors were black at that time. And I don't know whether that was on purpose or not, but in my unit, I'm saying what I see.

Lisa Perry:
Although the US military had been desegregated for over seven years at that point, Hank participated in Shot Wasp as part of an entirely black unit. Looking back, Hank believes there may have been more nefarious undertones to what he was a part of that day.

Hank Bolden:
As I've read since then, the troops that were actually in the predicted path of fallout, not a random path of fallout. There's a myth that people of color, believe it or not, can tolerate more pain. And I've been told that in my particular instance, the foxhole that I was in is analogous with the Tuskegee experiment.

Lisa Perry:
Shot Wasp was the only test that Hank would participate in before he was shipped back to his regular duty station, having never been told that he had been exposed to a nuclear detonation. Decades later, Hank would finally come to understand the gravity of what he experienced. When he began to struggle with an assortment of mysterious health issues.

Hank Bolden:
I actually went to the doctor because I had a pain in my left arm. It was that point when they did blood work that they found out that I had multiple myeloma. And that's when I started doing my research. When I found out about what an atomic veteran is, I put the numbers together as to the timing that all these different things happened. That's what happened to me, and that's what started my search.

Lisa Perry:
One of the reasons why Hank hadn't figured out what had happened to him earlier was because Congress had made it illegal for service members to discuss any part of their experience with anyone.

Hank Bolden:
As a unit gathered back into the barracks, the sergeant in charge just said that you were sworn to secrecy to not speak about it or be faced with a fine or imprisonment. You have to understand now, that ban was not lifted until 1996 by President Clinton. So you still, up to 1996, could not talk about what had happened back in 1955. And actually a lot of soldiers still died not knowing that they could talk about it. It was only up until my proving certain things that my family even became aware because it wasn't a conversation. My friends, no one, no one really knew. The feeling is, is hard to describe, but, in that respect, I felt that the government failed me and thousands of others.

President Clinton:
The United States of America offers a sincere apology to those of our citizens who were subjected to these experiments, to their families and to their communities. When the government does wrong, we have a moral responsibility to admit it.

Lisa Perry:
Once the oath of secrecy was finally lifted, surviving atomic veterans were free to seek disability compensation, and care for what they had been subjected to during their service. Hank would be eventually classified as 100% disabled due to various conditions he likely developed because of his exposure to nuclear fallout.

Hank Bolden:
I have multiple myeloma, which is uncurable. I've had the bladder cancer, that was taken care of. I have, uh, posterior subcapsular cataracts in the eyes, and glaucoma, which is from the blast. I also have, have thyroid and, diagnosed with problems with your reproductive organs.

Lisa Perry:
In an unlikely twist to his life story, Hank has transformed this dark legacy into a rebirth of sorts. After he left the military, Hank pursued a career as a working jazz musician, spending the better part of his life touring the country as a tenor saxophonist.

Hank Bolden:
It’s like the blood in my veins. It takes away all my other thoughts.

Lisa Perry:
But after receiving his payout from the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act, Hank was able to fulfill a lifelong dream. At the age of 83, he entered the Hart School of Music in Connecticut to obtain a formal degree in jazz performance.

Hank Bolden:
I spend my time right now with my music, you know. I've been doing music for 70 years, and music is what I still do. I still perform now. That's my life. I'm living right now at the best part of my life right now, the best part of my life. I don't have to run for anything. I don't have to worry about anything. But I had to pay the price to, to arrive at this point in life.

Lisa Perry:
While Hank is appreciative of the life that compensation has helped to provide, he says, if he could go back, he never would've participated in the test, if he had known the truth.

Hank Bolden:
Knowing what I was gonna get into, who would? Because you don't know what the end result would be. Yeah, I could be worse off. You could be dead, but that's the risk that you're taking. Who would do that? There's no amount of money for that.

Lisa Perry:
Hank Bolden and Jim Dangerfield were just two servicemen among the hundreds of thousands who witnessed and participated in the nuclear tests at the Nevada test site. In just under a decade of above ground testing, these detonations amounted to over a thousand cumulative kilotons of total explosive yield. And yet these numbers pale in comparison to the testing that was undertaken outside the US at the Pacific Proving Ground. This secondary testing area consisted of atolls of the Marshall Islands and water test sites in the Southern Pacific Ocean. This is where the US tested its thermonuclear weapons:
hydrogen bombs so humongous in scale that the military deemed them too dangerous to test in the continental United States. Between 1946 and 1952, the US conducted 105 nuclear tests in the Pacific, with the total explosive force of over 200 times what was detonated in the Nevada desert. Thousands of sailors would witness these explosions, which were unlike anything anyone had seen before.

Bud Feurt:
My name is Leo Feurt. I go by Bud most of the time. And I was in Operation HardTack in 1958. I was aboard the flagship, the U.S.S. Boxer CVS 21. I was machinist’s mate and a Guinea pig.

Lisa Perry:
Although Bud holds conflicting feelings about his experience with nuclear testing during his time in the Navy, Bud remains a proud military man. Wearing his Navy veteran hat and aviator sunglasses during our interview, underneath Bud's laid-back mannerisms lies a quiet and powerful intelligence. Originally from Wichita, Kansas, Bud has spent a long, successful career after the Navy traveling the world as an aircraft engineer. As the years passed, Bud's deteriorating health inspired him to begin reading everything he could get his hands on regarding fallout and radiation. Throughout our conversation, Bud would frequently suggest books for my own research.

Bud Feurt:
I went through 28 atomic bomb tests, and it got to the point where it was pretty terrifying. Each one. You never knew what was gonna happen. When we went over there, everybody wanted to see the atomic bomb test. Yeah, oh boy. Atomic bombs. You get, you're gonna see that. You know, that's very interesting. Well, after being over there and seeing a couple and being hit and stuff like that, you didn't want to be in it. You did not want to be in it. The mindset really changed about, Hey, you know, what in the hell are we doing out here?

Lisa Perry:
The test that permanently changed Bud's thinking was Shot Teak. The high altitude test shot was launched on a Redstone missile, but due to programming errors, it detonated directly over the island with the force of 250 Hiroshima bombs. The blast was seen as far away as Hawaii, and the resulting electromagnetic pulse knocked out communication in the area for up to eight hours.

Bud Feurt:
It was terrifying. The heat was so bad that it turned the back of my uniform like somebody had been on it with an iron and scorched it. There was people screaming. There was some people that went blind. There was windows blown out of the ship. Every time you do one of these closeups like that, and you cover your eyes, you can actually see the bones in your hands when it goes off. People said they would see rows of skeletons. People were running and, and yelling as it was so hot, we thought we were gonna burn up. We never knew how bad it was gonna be. Do they know? Is it gonna stop or is it gonna kill us?

Lisa Perry:
In another test, the navy detonated a bomb underwater close by to the U.S.S. Boxer. As the tide surge came in, later that evening, the ship became contaminated with radioactive seawater.

Bud Feurt:
I was working on an electric motor down in an elevator pit, and they told me, get out of there, that's radioactive. And I got out of there and I had to go to decontamination, threw away all my clothes, scrubbed down. And they went along with the Geiger counter. They picked me on. I went back to decontamination, threw away all my clothes again. And then that evening when you were going through the chow line, they were checking everybody. And there I went again. Three times in one day, I went to, to decontamination, threw away all my clothes, didn't have any shoes left, except for some tennis shoes I used when I had boat duty. And I had to buy new clothes.

Lisa Perry:
Shortly after this troubling decontamination experience, Bud came down with a mysterious illness that seemed to be going around the ship.

Bud Feurt:
I had radiation sickness, but they told us, oh, there's some kind of a flu going around. It wasn't, it was hotter then hell over there, but I felt like I was freezing and cold, and then diarrhea and everything else came with it. And, when I got to talking to some of the other veterans that were in atomic bomb test in Nevada, same thing happened to them.

Lisa Perry:
At the time, Bud didn't realize how significant these repeated exposures would be for his health, in part because the military systematically downplayed the risk of radiation to soldiers and sailors participating in testing.

Bud Feurt:
They were always trying to push that radiation, that's not dangerous. It's gone in a couple of days and don't worry about it, and there's no problems, and you're never gonna get any radiation. They already knew better than that because the people that were killed in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, more died from radiation than did with the blast.

Announcer:
The radiation level may be hot, but if you follow orders, you'll be moved out in time to avoid sickness. Finally, if you receive enough gamma radiation to cause sterility or severe sickness, you'll be killed by blast, flying debris or heat anyway.

Lisa Perry:
The oath that servicemen had been required to take not only prevented them from sharing what they had experienced, it also hindered their ability to seek medical care when they began to experience health effects from their radiation exposure, exposure that they had been told was benign.

Bud Feurt:
We could not talk to anybody. We weren't even supposed to talk amongst ourselves about what we saw in the atomic bomb test. You could not write any letters about anything, and they would, censor your letters. They especially didn't want you to talk to any physicians. I don't know how many thousands and thousands have died because they couldn't tell anybody what, what they felt like. You're never through with this radiation. Never. You've always got it.

Lisa Perry:
The end of atmospheric testing in the Pacific in 1958 left behind radiation, not just in the service members who participated. It also left large swaths of contaminated soil and debris across several atolls in the Marshall Islands, where the majority of the tests had been carried out. In 1977, almost 20 years after the end of testing, the United States returned to the Marshall Island atolls of Enewetak and Bikini, in an attempt to remediate the most severely contaminated areas. The hope was that the evicted Marshallese people might be able to return to their homeland after decades of radiological exile. Over a three-year period, more than 4,000 military personnel were involved in an extensive remediation effort of some of the largest nuclear tests ever conducted. Service members were chosen to carry out the sensitive cleanup effort, rather than trained nuclear professionals, in order to cut down on the cost of the massive undertaking. The remediation of the Pacific Proving Ground would culminate in the creation of a giant containment pit, where radioactive material was dumped into a former blast crater on Runit Island, and enclosed with concrete. This radioactive graveyard is known as the Runit dome. While this effort began with good intentions, in the end, it would become just another instance of servicemen bearing the consequences of our nuclear choices.

Paul Griego:
I'm Paul Griego, and I'm one of the young men and teenagers that were in the atomic cleanup and built that ominous dome on Runit Island.

Lisa Perry:
While most of the atomic cleanup was done by enlisted men, Paul Griego came to the project as one of the few civilian specialists. A trained radio chemist, Paul was hired to head a military team in collecting soil samples from around the different islands to test for radioactivity.

Paul Griego:
My work is what was used to determine what we would actually put inside the dome and what we would just dump into the lagoon.

Lisa Perry:
Today, Paul is in his early sixties, but he was only 20 years old when he traveled to the remote Marshall Islands to join the nuclear cleanup operation. A technician just three years out of high school himself, Paul was put in charge of a team of eight men whose only understanding of the danger of radiation came from a military instructional video.

Paul Griego:
There was not a lot of information about what we actually did out there, how contaminated it was, what to expect.

Paul Griego:
The men were like me. They were teenagers and young men. And with my experience, my training, I didn't know what was going on? You can imagine they did not understand what was going on. My crew were considered radiation technicians. Oh, they were 18, 19, I think the oldest was 22 years old. And their training, we watched a film and, uh, I recall it being black and white. They spoke about radiation in general. They even said something that at that time, I laughed at, that today bothers me. And they said that if your hair falls out, do not worry. It will grow back. And I laughed, and yeah, that's what they knew. Don't worry if you lose your hair, it'll grow back.

Announcer:
Soap and water. The best way to decontaminate yourself and your equipment. Be particularly careful to remove the dust from those parts of the body covered by hair.

Lisa Perry:
Using poorly trained enlisted men was just the beginning of the dangerous cost-cutting measures employed during the cleanup of the Marshall Islands. Proper radiological protective gear was in short supply or never provided at all. And the badges meant to detect radiation exposure often failed in the hot and humid island conditions.

Paul Griego:
My crew and I, uh, we would dig over 200 holes a day in the nuclear fallout. I would collect the soil. I’d have to actually use my hand to collect that and put it in the can. And that's what I did day after day after day. Our work days were 10 hours a day, six days a week. And my T-shirt, I used that as a, a dust mask like everybody else. When I arrived, there was nobody wearing hazmat suits. There wasn't even a, a safety shower like we had in our laboratory. And there was none of that, no radiation safety whatsoever. Every time we went to ground zero, and there were 43 ground zeros, we should have been in a hazmat suit, absolutely, without a doubt, because we were re-suspending the contaminants. And that was a terrible mistake.

Lisa Perry:
Not only did the military fail to put adequate radiation safety protocols in place for the workers, they actively discouraged those who sought additional protective measures, minimizing the danger posed as no worse than a dental x-ray.

Paul Griego:
As time went on, I said, you know, I, I need a Geiger counter for what I'm doing. I have the lives of eight men, it’s my responsibility. Oh, no, you can't have one, because they're all issued. They wouldn't let me have one. Hmm, okay, try again. I said, you know, I really want a a Geiger counter. They said, well, I'm sorry, because you would have to be trained how to use it. And I point to the Geiger counter, I said, do you see? It says, Eberline. I'm with Eberline. I'm not only how to use it. I could calibrate it. I could teach them how to use it. And in fact, I at times had to actually teach them how to use it.

Lisa Perry:
Paul eventually realized that the limited protocols that were in place were more safety theater than actual safety practices.

Paul Griego:
They did have what we call hotlines, where they would have the safe side of the island and the, the hot side of the island. And that's just an arbitrary line where they would have the Air Force with, Geiger counters. I'd do my 10 hours worth of workday. And before leaving, we had to show our hands to see if it would go off. And if it did, there was just a big bucket full of water that we'd just wash our hands in. Everybody would wash their hands in the same bucket. And then if we were still going off like crazy, then we'd have to go into the lagoon and wash off in there. They really didn't do a thorough job. I even, for example, with one of them, looked at their setting on their Geiger counter, and they were set wrong and I had to reset. And he didn't like that because it went brrrrr, and he didn't wanna hear that all day long. So he had purposely set the, the Geiger counter to a different setting so that it wouldn't irritate him on his 10 hours standing there at that line with everybody going through,

Lisa Perry:
Of all the things Paul witnessed during his time in the marshals, he struggles the most with the fact that he was unable to protect the men who were under his supervision.

Paul Griego:
We had this big jug of water, you know, that they would give us and they would pack it like mostly ice, so that during the day it would melt. And we would have cold water. And I'm with my crew, and they reach in and grab ice to put ice in their mouth or put ice on just your neck and they would reach in with their dirty hands. And at the end of the day, I would open up that case and it was dirty. There was all sorts of, of debris inside our drinking water. And I told these guys don't drink it, and they would look at me like I was in a little grandmother. And how tempting. It's over a hundred degrees. You've been working all day. It's hot, it's humid. You're thirsty. And there is this batch of deceiving cold, icy water, that in truth is poison. And, sadly, um, I believe I went thirsty and they went to early graves. Today there should be 36 soil samplers, and I do not know a single one that's alive.

Lisa Perry:
The efforts to remediate the nuclear radiation on the Bikini and Enewetak atolls lasted from 1977 to 1980. Of the servicemen who were posted on the most contaminated islands, 20% would go on to develop cancer. And an additional 34% reported other health problems associated with radiation, including infertility, bone loss, and thyroid disorders. And yet, despite their sacrifices, they were only able to contain a small fraction of the irradiated soil and debris to the Runit dome.

Paul Griego:
We put 110,000 cubic yards into the nuclear blast crater that's now the dome, and that was most radioactive. But we did a total of 800,000 cubic yards. So that means only 100,000 of 800,000 went into the dome. The other, we dumped into three sites in the lagoon, but low level radiation, when you're talking 43 atmospheric bombs, in a small area like that, there's no such thing

Lisa Perry:
Compounding the problem, in recent years, the Runit Dome has been showing signs of failing. Recent surveys have noted cracks in the structure, and the Marshallese people have been trying to raise the alarm that this highly radioactive dumping pit is increasingly threatened by the rising ocean levels and intensifying weather due to climate change.

Paul Griego:
The dome has some of the highest level radioactive debris and, and soil in there. We threw in pieces of plutonium. Plutonium has a half life of 24,000 years. I, I can't imagine how many years that dome is gonna last. The dome is now 42 years old, and it's made of concrete. It's right there in the ocean. It's conceivable that it's, uh, one typhoon away from catastrophic failure, or just simply deteriorating and collapsing.

Lisa Perry:
In a depressing conclusion, one recent report from Lawrence Livermore Laboratory dismissed concerns about the potential failure of the dome because the amount of radioactive particles still present in atoll sediment is so high that the release of the dome contents into the environment would not make a significant difference in what the local population is already exposed to. Of the 40 islands that make up the Enewetak atoll, only three are now designated as habitable, although some would consider that a liberal interpretation of the word. The few hundred local Marshallese who have returned can no longer grow their own food, fish in the lagoon, or even sell locally produced goods, and are almost entirely dependent on imported canned goods and government assistance.

Paul Griego:
In truth, the atomic cleanup was futile and dangerous. We didn’t clean anything. We didn't get rid of anything. All we did is, is move things around. Sure, we moved some into the dome of the most radioactive, but most everything we just dumped into the lagoon. But when we do have the, the nuclear blast, the fallout didn't just fall on land, it fell out everywhere into the sea, into the water, into the lagoon, onto the islands. So we were there to clean up something that can't be cleaned up. We were given an impossible task.

Lisa Perry:
The Veterans Administration defines an atomic veteran as a service member who was exposed to ionizing radiation during active duty. It's estimated that at least 400,000 veterans meet this definition. Nearly half a million soldiers, predominantly young enlisted men, were sworn to a lifetime of secrecy, under the threat of imprisonment, about the nuclear experiments they were compelled to participate in. For almost half a century, their sacrifice went unacknowledged until President Clinton ordered Congress to repeal the Nuclear Radiation Secrecy Act in 1996, releasing them from their forced silence. For Bud Feurt, that silence speaks loud.

Bud Feurt:
It was 50 years, 50 years that we were under oath. It was just to keep you from talking to your physicians. It was to keep people from finding out the dangers of radiation. That's all it was. They were using us. There is nobody that ever was fined or went to jail for treason. But there are people still here today that are afraid to talk about it because of that oath they took way back there 70 years ago. It's very, it's a very shameful thing.

Lisa Perry:
Military service is inherently dangerous, but servicemen rightfully expect that the government they serve will be honest about the risks and would care for them if they were injured in the course of their service. Although our government was not honest with atomic veterans, it would eventually offer monetary compensation to those who could prove participation in nuclear testing and who were diagnosed with a qualifying medical condition. Of course, the process to obtain proof of participation in a highly top-secret operation has been fraught with endless red tape for many veterans, preventing access to care.

Bud Feurt:
The atomic veterans were constantly denied government consultation until 1990, nearly three decades after the nuclear test concluded. I had put in for, uh, compensation and disability, and I've been fighting them for 15 years. They finally admitted that I was service-related due to exposure to ionized radiation. But they won't gimme anything. Zero, nothing, you know, that's it.

Lisa Perry:
Those who participated in the cleanup of nuclear testing sites like Paul Griego have also struggled to receive care. These cleanup crews were originally left out of atomic veteran legislation and were denied compensation and disability coverage until as recently as 2022, when Congress finally passed, after long standing pressure from veterans groups, the Promise to Address Comprehensive Toxics Act.

Paul Griego:
It boils down to who pays the cost and who gets the benefit. I felt exploited and I feel exploited. I believe all the young men that I worked with side by side were exploited. The cost is still there, but we paid it. We paid it with our health, we paid it with our lives.

Lisa Perry The long fight to achieve recognition for the sacrifices of atomic veterans has left many embittered. Jim Dangerfield has found that his feelings on the subject have only grown stronger with time.

Jim Dangerfield:
I am, I guess the best way to describe this is I am mad and mad as hell. The more I understood what was going on the madder I got. As the information began to flow out, and I began to be able to talk to other veterans and see what they've gone through mentally and physically, I, it's indescribable what my feelings are.

Lisa Perry:
Veterans have pushed for decades to get recognition and compensation. And recently they have finally begun to see some success. In one symbolic but powerful footnote to this effort, in 2021, President Biden declared July 16th as National Atomic Veterans Day. But for many, these efforts came too late. For those who never got the chance to see justice, we can only work to prevent such tragedies from occurring again. The military justified risking the health and wellbeing of its sworn servicemen because it believed that nuclear war was winnable. For those soldiers who were witness to the devastation wrought by nuclear weapons, they would argue otherwise

Jim Dangerfield:
When you went through the test, when you came back, and that's when you were told that you had just experienced the bomb and you could live again, that you could go into battle with atomic warfare and you would survive. And that's what they were trying to do all along, was to be able to prove that you could be in an atomic warfare and still survive. Which of course now when you look back on it, <laugh>, that's, it was a lie. The big lie. I don't want my grandkids or my great grandkids someday walking out in front of an atomic bomb. We don't wanna see atomic warfare. I don't care what you're told, we're not prepared. Period.

Lisa Perry:
For Paul Grego, having dealt firsthand with what is left over from nuclear detonations, he believes that those who focus on surviving a nuclear war are misunderstanding the true problem of nuclear weapons.

Paul Griego:
I hear in conversations we say, oh, well, you know, but how do you survive a nuclear war? And from my experience, you don't wanna survive a nuclear war. There's not life after a nuclear war. It's a nuclear wasteland. And it's a, it's a slow death, cancers, contaminants. And it'll never be the same. Just like Marshall Islands. They will never be the same

Lisa Perry:
Like the landscape of the Marshall Islands, the lives of most atomic veterans were permanently altered because of our nuclear legacy. While the government has in recent years taken steps to be more accountable to these veterans, the truth is that acknowledgement and compensation will never change what they have had to endure. Nor will it bring back those who died before their time. For having been subjected to the most destructive force known to mankind, today, atomic veterans have been awarded a lifetime of health complications, a bit of cash, and a single slip of paper.

Hank Bolden:
Well, the compensation is there for atomic veterans. There's nothing more that the government can give you. They can't cure all of the illnesses that you have. You know, you know, they can't give you back, uh, moments of life that you've lost. But what they do, they give you a certificate, showing, stating that you are an atomic veteran. And I'll show you what that certificate looked like. It's hanging on a wall. I'll just take it down. I'll show you what it looked like. I dunno whether you can see that or not.

Lisa Perry:
Yeah, yeah. I see that. Department of Defense, United States of America, Atomic Veterans Service Certificate, Private First Class Henry Bolden.

Hank Bolden:
Yeah. Well, that's, that's, that's all they give you, you know, to acknowledge you.

This podcast is a creation of the William J. Perry Project, and is made possible by the generous support of the Carnegie Corporation and the Nuclear Threat Initiative.

Special thanks to the Atomic Veterans who spoke with us for this episode:
Jim Dangerfield, Hank Bolden, Bud Feurt, and Paul Griego, and thank you to Dr. Alex Wellerstein for lending his invaluable expertise.

For a transcript of this episode, or to learn how you can support Atomic Veterans, go to our website:
www.atthebrink.org

 

This episode was written by myself and David Perry. Production support was provided by Jeff Large and Maggie Fischer from Come Alive Creative. Isadore Nieves is our audio producer, and Ryan Hobler is our composer and audio engineer. Production assistance was provided by Maggie O’Brien and Katharine Leede.

 

And thank you to our listeners - you're helping us to try and save the world one podcast at a time. If you want to support our efforts, please share our podcast with your friends. I'm Lisa Perry. Thanks for listening