Celluloid Mushroom Clouds by Joyce Evans

Author:Joyce Evans
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor and Francis

Journalists were invited by the government to cover the tests, and they sat on bleachers atop a small hill ten miles from ground zero, a spot that came to be known as "News Nob." Their accounts focused on the visual effects of the explosion and the aftermath, while they consistently praised the government for its success in nuclear testing. All the while, the media repeated the AEC stand on the absence of radiation hazards.27 A typical description was: "The dust cloud which swept across the trenches was choking and blinding.... It was a horrible feeling to see that monster cloud, loaded with radiation, rising in an expanding ring virtually over our heads. But the scientists' calculations were correct, the cloud drifted directly away from us. We were safe from radiation fallout."28

Gradually, the AEC's reputation began to suffer amid a growing international outcry against atmospheric testing. Even AEC staff members were admitting that bomb tests might cause occasional death, yet few suggested that the tests should stop. Prominent opponents of testing such as Linus Pauling and Albert Schweitzer found that they could draw attention to the problem by talking about the potential far-reaching consequences of fallout contamination upon milk. By 1959, the U.S. Public Health Service, which had begun to monitor fallout in foods, noticed a sharp increase in the amounts of the isotope strontium 90 in milk. Within a few years, the concentration of this isotope had doubled in American children. Worries about contaminated milk prompted thousands of letters to Congress; the issue became so serious that dairies were concerned about potentially declining sales.29

Much of the growing public anxiety over atomic testing and its effects was due to publicity generated by newly formed antinuclear groups that focused upon the dangers of fallout. By 1956, several independent scientists, including Schweitzer, Pauling, Nobel Prize winner Hermann Muller, and others were openly criticizing the AEC and the bomb tests that were threatening the environment with deadly radioactive dust. Adlai Stevenson's presidential campaign brought the bomb test issue into the limelight, as he warned against the hazards of global fallout. National groups such as Leo Szilard's Council for a Livable World, Physicians for Social Responsibility, and the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy (SANE) organized against bomb development and testing. Hundreds of citizens, not only members of pacifist and religious groups but also businesspeople, administrators, and labor union members, wrote to President Eisenhower in opposition to the bomb tests.

SANE and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in Great Britain were formed of countless smaller antinuclear groups, and survived on donations and volunteers. The groups aimed to promote a constructive fear of nuclear weapons by reminding people of Hiroshima; they relied on general moral appeal and hoped for action through disarmament. A typical SANE advertisement linked the threat of bombs with fallout from atmospheric testing; a typical slogan was "Nuclear bombs can destroy all life in war . . . nuclear tests are endangering our health right now."

Although atomic testing was perceived as necessary for

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