The Mushroom Cloud and the X-Ray Machine: A Special Investigation into the Risks of Radiation | Fore
At 6:45 a.m. on March 1, 1954, the earth rumbled beneath 10-year-old Jalel John’s feet as she stood on Ailuk Atoll in the Marshall Islands. Above her, half the sky turned strange colors. She remembers, in particular, the reds—the uncanny shades of red.
Within six minutes, a mushroom cloud reached 130,000 feet overhead, pulling with it the pulverized coral of islands. Left behind was a crater that measured more than a mile wide and 250 feet deep, vast enough to be visible from space. Some 350 miles away from the blast, John experienced the largest thermonuclear explosion that the U.S. military would ever detonate, a test known as Castle Bravo. (It reached a yield of 15 megatons; in layman’s terms, that’s 1,000 times more powerful than the bomb dropped over Hiroshima.)
Then came the fallout.
At around noon, a white, powdery substance began to drift down from the sky—first onto Rongelap Atoll, some 100 miles east of the explosion, and then onto Utirik Atoll, 300 miles away from the blast. On Ailuk, where John lived, a fine fog filled the air, finally settling on the earth and the atoll’s enclosed lagoon.
The following day, U.S. military planes flew over these islands, measuring radiation levels in the atmosphere. In the evening, an Air Force seaplane landed on Rongelap. The two men who got out of the aircraft were there for no more than 20 minutes and didn’t speak to anyone. They recorded high levels of radiation: The islanders’ total dose was estimated to be between 110 roentgens—enough to induce vomiting and cause muscle aches—and 340 roentgens, which could kill a person. By the next morning, the USS Philip, a slim, gray battleship, had arrived to evacuate all 65 people on Rongelap. Shortly after, the U.S. Navy moved 154 people off Utirik.
But John and some 400 other residents remained on Ailuk. The total dose of radiation they had received, estimated at a maximum of 20 roentgens, “would not be a medical problem,” an Air Force lieutenant colonel reported to command that week.
Complete story at - http://foreignpolicy.com/2015/03/26/low-dose-radiation/
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