America at the Atomic Crossroads(newyorker.com) |
America at the Atomic Crossroads(newyorker.com) |
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The local language grew full of horrible expressions for birth defects: “jellyfish” (babies born without bones), “grapes” (spontaneously aborted clumps of tissue), “turtles,” “octopuses,” “apples,” “devils.” The Crossroads tests were the beginning of one of the more disturbing American nuclear legacies—a trade of flesh for knowledge.
And even the total amount of radiation is also beside the point. The real nasty is the amount of radiation dropped onto and into people, the fallout. Bombs high in the atmosphere produce far less fallout than those on the surface or close thereto. Then one can get into square-area v volume maths that explain why fallout in rain (concentrated into 2d on the surface) is so much more deadly than fallout dissolved in ocean water (diluted into a 3d ocean). This is an important distinction when talking about the post-tsunami radiation events.
If was a horrible series of tests with little regard for local inhabitants, but that is no excuse for false equivalences.
'Meshcheryakov, the Soviet physicist, like all of the international observers, was not allowed to see any more than the reporters. But he still saw much. The mushroom clouds from Able and Baker interested him some, but he was more taken with what he saw in the people around him. The Americans, he told Moscow, were not in any way interested in disarmament. Rather, they were training their armed forces to integrate nuclear weapons into their military doctrine.'
Of course, disarmament doesn't really make sense: once science has discovered something, it can't be undiscovered. Integrating every new discovery into one's doctrine (even if that integration is, 'we'd rather not') is far more mature than pretending something doesn't exist.
Curtis LeMay (IIRC) stated that those two were by far the preferable options: but failing those, it was imperative that the US had "the best, the biggest, and the most".
If you look at the relative size of the two armies and (especially) the size of the tank corps, you'll understand why that was.
The United States wasn't about to give up nukes if it meant its interests in Europe would be at the mercy of a massive Soviet tank invasion.
> "The Americans, he told Moscow, were not in any way interested in disarmament. Rather, they were training their armed forces to integrate nuclear weapons into their military doctrine."
As others have pointed out, this is only a surface-level interpretation of what was going on.