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Not-so-secret atomic tests: Why the photographic film industry knew (2013)
- brooklyndude 11y agoI hope people realize that every living being on the planet now has been contaminated by the atomic tests. Not a one of else escaped that one - if you were born after 1955 that is.
- Amorymeltzer 11y agoTitle should note this is from 2013.
- mikeash 11y agoThis article paints it as a dark conspiracy that Kodak was informed but not farmers or the general public. It seems to me that there's a simpler explanation: the dangers of radiation were not well understood at the time, and they probably legitimately thought that e.g. the dangers of malnutrition from disposing of contaminated milk were greater than the dangers posed by the contamination.
- Spooky23 11y agoI'd buy that for 1945. Not for 1960. A conscious decision was made that the value of convenient testing outweighed public welfare. IMO, secrecy leads to a lack of accountability which leads to bad behavior -- a pattern seen time and again with nuclear weaponry and supporting industry.
- acqq 11y agoAbsolutely not for 1960. For example, the plot of this 1954 movie is based on Jerry Lewis' character being expected to die for only driving over the old nuclear test site: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Living_It_Up https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Living_It_Up
- mikeash 11y agoThe dangers of acute radiation poisoning were certainly well known by then. Two Manhattan Project scientists died in 1945 and 1946 from radiation poisoning, and of course there were a lot of Japanese civilian deaths. The long-term danger of lower doses is a rather different thing, though, and that took a lot longer to be well understood. There are a lot of things which are dangerous in large doses but harmless or even beneficial in small doses, after all.
- qubex 11y agoTrivial point of logic: knowledge of the long-term risk of low-level exposure was arrived at by having this kind of low-level exposure and compounding it over the duration of those long-term periods...
- acqq 11y agoNo. At least the first page of the 1964 paper that makes a review of the previous work mentions the work done since mid-forties (that means, since around 1945) at Hanford. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=PdfExcerptURL&_imagekey=3-s2.0-B9781483228907500114-main.pdf&_piikey=B9781483228907500114&_cdi=305021&_orig=PublicationURL&_zone=rslt_list_item&_fmt=abst&_eid=3-s2.0-B9781483228907500114&_isbn=9781483228907&_user=12975512&md5=8bcbbf00791e23975ee7ebb0c07e48fb&ie=/excerpt.pdf http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=PdfExcerptURL&_imag... About that work at Hanford: http://www.hanfordproject.com/atmospheric.html http://www.hanfordproject.com/atmospheric.html "Classified studies done at Hanford revealed how radioiodine traveled through the food chain, increasing in concentration as it moved upwards into higher consumer species. Clandestine studies conducted at Hanford revealed how high dosage levels of ingested iodine-131 in sheep showed "virtually complete destruction" of their thyroids and those of their offspring. [3] Hanford officials repeatedly assured the public that, "not one atom" has escaped the facility. At one press conference officials stated bluntly that the facility was "safe as mother's milk" even as they were well aware of the possibility of compromising the health of both workers and the general public through Hanford's plutonium production activities. [4]" And about Hanford as the facility: "For more than forty years, Hanford released radioactive contamination into the environment while producing plutonium for the U.S. nuclear arsenal during the Cold War era. Although the majority of the releases were due to activities related to production, some were also planned and intentional."
- Someone1234 11y agoThat doesn't explain why they continued to detonate bombs within the continental US around farm land. I agree that they cannot roll back what had already occurred, but that ignores that this took place halfway through the most intense bomb testing.
- mannykannot 11y agoI think this is a somewhat unfair representation of the article, which contains rather less speculation, at least proportionately, than your post here - it does, for example, discuss what was believed, and when, about the risks of fallout.
- mikeash 11y agoThe article states that the AEC knew radioactive iodine would contaminate milk and enter the population, but is quite vague on the state of knowledge of the dangers of that contamination at the time. Skimming the 1998 Senate hearing linked in the article, the link between radioactive iodine ingestion and thyroid cancer was apparently unsure even in 1998, although considered likely by then.
- mannykannot 11y ago>Skimming the 1998 Senate hearing linked in the article, the link between radioactive iodine ingestion and thyroid cancer was apparently unsure even in 1998, although considered likely by then. Skimming certain recent senate hearings, one might conclude that global warming is quite possibly a dark conspiracy by climate scientists. I have worked in the nuclear industry prior to 1998, and I can tell you that the risks were well enough understood by then. If the risks were not suspected at the time of the tests, why would anyone be thinking of disposing of milk?
- mikeash 11y agoThe article says they argued that disposing of the milk would cause malnutrition. An obvious conclusion would be that they thought the risks from the contamination were smaller than the risks of malnutrition. They may well have known of some risks but not understood the magnitude. When was it understood that radioactive iodine caused thyroid cancer, and that it could be mitigated by using iodine supplements? I couldn't find any info on exactly when that whole chain was put together (not that I tried super hard).
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- sjburt 11y agoIt seems like another possibility is that Kodak selling fogged film represented an intelligence risk. Kodak distributes film internationally; an adversary could probably correlate production dates with atomic tests and learn about fallout quantities, species, etc without ever entering the US. So the decision may have been made solely on those grounds.
- swehner 11y ago"There is something wrong with this picture."
- Kinnard 11y ago"You should love your country— but never trust its government."
- cjensen 11y agoIndiana is heck of a long way from Trinity, and Trinity was an Atomic Bomb with far less fallout than a Hydrogen Bomb. So while the latter clearly caused health problems for Americans, I'm skeptical of the claims that photos were affected by Trinity.
- grkvlt 11y agoSo, you're suggesting it was one of the many other atomic bomb tests carried out in 1945? The article (and other related information I've read in many sources on the Manhattan projects) is pretty clear about the connection. Fallout got into the Corn being grown in Indiana, which was then used to make packing material for Kodak, that fogged the film...
- cjensen 11y agoNo, I'm suggesting the timeline is wrong and the fogging either is apocryphal or occurred later during hydrogen testing.,
- ChuckMcM 11y agoYou would need to look at the weather patterns. As it turns out there is a reasonably steady movement of atmosphere diagonally up and to the right from the gulf of California into Maine. If you have been watching this year's weather you can see it in action. What is more salient is that moist air coming up from the Gulf of California begins to condense out into rain in the plains. The transport mechanism is fairly well understood and well documented. That said, the film was susceptible because it was packed with corn husks over an extended period of time. The combination of sensitivity, and extended exposure, led to the film fogging.
- acqq 11y agoIt was really the US politics of these times to present the atom bomb and the tests as "a good thing" in general: http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2011/07/wish_you_wereboom.html http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2011/07/wish_y... Also, the "bikini" famously got its name from the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bikini_Atoll https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bikini_Atoll "Between 1946 and 1958, 23 nuclear devices were detonated by the United States at seven test sites located on the reef, inside the atoll, in the air, or underwater.[4]" "Building on this attention, in 1946, French engineer Louis Réard named his new swimsuit design the bikini, in hopes that its revealing style would create an "explosive commercial and cultural reaction" similar to the 1946 nuclear explosion at Bikini Atoll.[5][6][7][8][9]" The press loved it. I also remember reading about some US leaflets containing something like "if somebody comes to you showing the reading of a Geiger counter, don't trust him, he's doing the foreign propaganda and just tries to make our citizens feel less secure." Maybe somebody remembers that better?
- s_q_b 11y agoA large part of the "Atoms for Peace" and "Our Friend the Atom" were a result of Eisenhower's deliberate attempt to normalize the usage of nuclear weapons in combat.
- lfowles 11y agoThe National Atomic Testing Museum in Las Vegas is a fascinating museum about the era of atomic testing if parent's post piques your interest.
- acqq 11y agoAlso: "From 1951 to 1957, the United States military and the Atomic Energy Commission collaborated in a series of human radiation experiments called the Desert Rock exercises." It seems they ordered soldiers to observe the explosion and then march through the site. http://www.strangerdimensions.com/2012/07/09/the-united-states-desert-rock-exercises-of-1951/ http://www.strangerdimensions.com/2012/07/09/the-united-stat... The voice of the announcer in the video after the detonation: "these experiments are designed to dispel much of fear and uncertainty surrounding atomic radiation" "only 10% of injuries are due to the gamma rays" The report of one of the soldiers: http://www.angelfire.com/tx/atomicveteran/my-story.html http://www.angelfire.com/tx/atomicveteran/my-story.html "When getting a reading almost anywhere near Ground Zero the Geiger needle just lay over on the maximum, so we started not to pay much attention to whatever the reading was on those Geiger Counters."
- tyingq 11y agoReminds me of Sun Microsystems' 2001 issue with cosmic rays scrambling SRAM caches in customer's servers...crashing them. http://www.sparcproductdirectory.com/artic-2002-jan-pb.html http://www.sparcproductdirectory.com/artic-2002-jan-pb.html
- kevinchen 11y agoSure, if the radiation was caused by bomb tests where the government knew about the risks, and the machines were running a large percentage of life-support systems.
- tyingq 11y agoOr, you know, maybe a form of radiation creating initially confusing side effects within a commercial product.
- efm 11y agohttp://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/causes-prevention/risk/radiation/i131-report-and-appendix http://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/causes-prevention/risk/ra... Link to a report on exposure.
- matthewmcg 11y agoI've always thought that the well-coiffed narrator in this "Report on the Effects of Radiation Fallout "(included in Peter Kuran's documentary Trinity and Beyond) perfectly encapsulates the attitude of the military establishment about the the known fallout hazard: https://youtu.be/fCJm0jBuTo0?t=3820 https://youtu.be/fCJm0jBuTo0?t=3820 "The development of our nuclear power has been an absolutely necessary protection against the development of the Communist threat. In this view, the few casualties, if any, must be seen as those of unidentified soldiers in a war in the service of humanity..."
- acqq 11y agoIn that light, read the statement of Brzezinski (the President's National Security Advisor at that time) regarding the US support of Islamism in Afghanistan since 1979 (the same year the Islamic revolution happened in neighboring Iran): "Q: And neither do you regret having supported the Islamic [integrisme], having given arms and advice to future terrorists? Brzezinski: What is most important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war?" Quite consistent.
- herdrick 11y agoBrzezinski was right. Statesmanship is about tradeoffs and prioritiztion. This was a great bargain.
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- mcherm 11y agoMy observation is that the government tendency to keep secrets apparently does not (or at least in this case did not) extend to keeping the secrets from those who have enough information to detect that there IS a secret. Kodak's scientists could tell that nuclear radiation bursts were occurring, and so the US government told them the details of the nuclear testing. This has implications on the kinds of systems that we want to set up to protect against governments keeping secrets that they shouldn't. If we make sure that certain groups can tell THAT there are secrets (without knowing what the secrets are) perhaps that provides an effective check on government abuses.
- whitegrape 11y ago"If we make sure that certain groups can tell THAT there are secrets (without knowing what the secrets are) perhaps that provides an effective check on government abuses." I'm a group of one, and I know that there are secrets. I have no idea what the secrets are. How does this help? Maybe you meant to say that the groups should be able to detect the presence of certain types of secrets without knowing all the details -- evidence of nuclear testing, evidence of crypto backdoors, evidence of mass spying on the public, evidence of advanced aliens... But how general should this detection be and what types and strengths of evidence should be granted to these privileged groups? How do you get a government with no intention of letting any evidence about their secrets getting out to go along with the idea of allowing other non-government groups to get a flavor of their secrets? (Come on downvoters, let's tease out the details of this way-too-vaguely-specified idea. For any given covert-but-shouldn't-be government activity X, how can we make sure X is done such that it leaves trails that could in theory be picked up by third parties to detect something is going on without knowing all the details?)
- mcherm 11y agoAre you guessing that there are secrets, or do you KNOW that there are secrets? Can you testify to Congress that there are secrets? Notice how the story changed after Snowden revealed the fact that the US government was doing ubiquitous surveillance. Previously other people had reported that but not been believed. Some Senators knew about it but were prohibited from saying it was happening. Once it was revealed by a trusted source (trusted because his evidence proved he wasn't just making it up) the whole story changed.
- MikeNomad 11y agoDoes this mean Kodak has a lot of nuclear testing related information that can be had without going through FOIA requests?
- jameshart 11y agoThat's... a weird question. That's like saying 'maybe Kodak has some money I could get without going through applying for a tax rebate'.
- gus_massa 11y agoIt's strange that the article is centered in Iodine-131 [1]. It has a half life of 8 days, so if the corn is contaminated, it would be almost clean at the time it's distributed. It's different for milk, because it's collected, sold and drink in two or three days. For the film industry I'd be more worried about Strontium-90 [2] that has a half life of 29 years, so it can survive long enough to get collected, processed and used. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iodine-131 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iodine-131 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strontium-90 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strontium-90
- exw 11y agoIf you look through the comments on this article, somebody else made the same point, and claimed that it was actually cerium-141, and not Iodine-131: <<Tim, Thanks for this article and I think you did a great job on a very important but little known topic. I've researched this quite a bit and I'm certain it was cerium-141, not iodine-131, that was lodged in Kodak's packing material that fogged their film, and the packing material was strawboard, not corn husks. (There's some disagreement on the internet - even a U.S. senator who had misspoken on the facts - but if you really dig deep, you'll find it was strawboard.) >>
- fnordfnordfnord 11y agoSr-90 is a huge hazard if it gets into your food supply. It replaces/binds Calcium and pings your bone marrow with ~.5MeV betas (electrons).
- acqq 11y agoThere's the reason: the affected children who drank the milk, as the Iodine-131 was the topic of this article: http://www.ieer.org/latest/iodnart.html http://www.ieer.org/latest/iodnart.html "The exposure of millions of children is especially troubling because much of it could have been avoided." "American children were actually exposed to 15 to 70 times as much radiation as had been previously reported to Congress." The same article mentions the Kodak story ("The physicist's knowledge of the secret project was not altogether surprising: the Kodak Company ran the Tennessee Eastman uranium processing plant at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory") and has many more valuable and relevant details.
- earljwagner 11y agoHas anyone estimated how many early deaths were caused by the radiation exposure?
- filearts 11y agoExtrapolating from the fallout patterns from the map, it appears that Canadians would have been among the more affected victims. Can anyone comment on how the inquiry and response was handled in Canada? Do we know what the statistics were for the resulting cancers here?
- valugi 11y ago"Kodak kept the radiation exposure silent". That is a Kodak moment for history books.
- chanandler_bong 11y agoIf you want to read more on this type of subject, check out "The Plutonium Files" by Eileen Welsome. Pretty scary. http://www.amazon.com/The-Plutonium-Files-Americas-Experiments/dp/0385319541 http://www.amazon.com/The-Plutonium-Files-Americas-Experimen...
- ck2 11y agoThere is a discussion on reddit about how many people got cancer from this and died way before their time because farms got so much radiation fallout from rain.
- atomicbeanie 11y agoIt is comic that they would protect milk for children, when the DOE was experimenting on unwilling hospital patients: http://fas.org/sgp/othergov/doe/lanl/pubs/00326649.pdf http://fas.org/sgp/othergov/doe/lanl/pubs/00326649.pdf Not so much "Government for the People". Why such decision makers are above the law is baffling, really.
- dnautics 11y agoI wonder if Morton salt company was subsidized to add iodine in the national salt supply as a prophylactic measure.
- astrodust 11y agoThat's to avoid iodine deficiency. Adding that pretty much eliminated the condition.