Antinuclear

The link between Castle Bravo and modern environmentalism

 William Souder William Souder is the author of On a Farther Shore: The Life and Legacy of Rachel Carson, which was published in September 2012 on the 50th…

Sixty years ago, in the predawn hours of March 1, 1954, a Japanese tuna boat named Daigo Fukuryu Maru (“Lucky Dragon no. 5”) was fishing near the Marshall Islands in the central Pacific. Its engine off, the ship drifted silently on a glassy sea. Overhead, the stars illuminated a few wandering clouds. Suddenly a blinding wall of light appeared on the western horizon. As the crew rushed on deck, the light changed from white to yellow, and then to orange and finally a deep red—a monster light that continued to grow and rise into the sky. After a few minutes, the 99-ton ship lurched as a deafening roar passed over it…….

The test at Bikini Atoll that day—code named Castle Bravo—was of the first practical hydrogen bomb. A year and a half earlier, the United States had exploded the first hydrogen device, which was the size of a small building. …..

The crew would spend months being treated for radiation sickness in a Tokyo hospital. All but the radio operator Kuboyama eventually recovered, although many later suffered from liver and blood disorders.

The Castle Bravo incident caused international consternation. …….

A few years later, marine biologist and author Rachel Carson recounted Kuboyama’s death in the most sensational book of 1962: Silent Spring……

One of Carson’s challenges in writing Silent Spring was how to convince her readers of the then-novel idea that an unseen chemical contaminant that might be anywhere (or everywhere) might cause unanticipated collateral damage to ecosystems. She solved this problem by perceiving a parallel between pesticides and radiation. Invisible, ubiquitous, and accumulating in the tissues of living things over time, pesticides and radioactive fallout from nuclear testing were, Carson argued, the twin existential problems of the modern age……HTTP://THEBULLETIN.ORG/LINK-BETWEEN-CASTLE-BRAVO-AND-MODERN-ENVIRONMENTALISM

March 8, 2014 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | Uncategorized