Operation Crossroads was a disaster the Navy tried to hide for over forty years

Sailors caught in the warm radioactive mist of Baker Shot
Downwind, some said the mist felt good during the hot day.

Operation Crossroads was designed to show the world the power of the new US atomic weapons. It was also designed to measure the effects and learn how to decontaminate navy ships. The second underwater test was less visually impressive but created much more radioactive particles. There was not the proper equipment to monitor the plutonium and alpha particles. Navy men anxious to get their ships back grew angry and frustrated at scientists who said that ships repeated cleaned were still dangerous. Anxious not to permanently lose ships crews were repeated sent to clean ships again and again. Finally after the salvage commander was shown an X-ray of a fish from the lagoon made by just placing the fish on the negative they ended Operation Crossroads without setting off the third bomb. Afterwards the naval commander of the operation urged the world to ban the new weapons as the worst type of poison.

John Smitherman's story

First they cut off his left leg, then his right leg; in April the surgeon carved a chunk of flesh from his back. They have offered to take his left hand, swollen to the size of a cantaloupe, whenever he is ready to part with it.

John Smitherman says his government did this to him. His government says it did not.

Five times since 1977, when his failing body rendered him unfit work, Smitherman has asked the VA to award him disability pay. Five times the VA has rejected his claim, and a decision on his sixth appeal is expected any day.

"I think they're gonna turn me down again," he said last week.

"It was just a huge ball of fire -- just looked like a whole section of the ocean was actually on fire -- big rolling balls of fire started going up in the air."

The sea welled up and surged forth from ground zero, tossing about the destroyer Allen M. Summer beneath Smitherman's feet. Hours later, he recalls, the Summer -- one of more than 100 ships taking part in an exercise called Operation Crossroads in 1946 -- steamed into the lagoon where unmanned target ships had been anchored to test how they would weather the blast and to determine if they could later be rid of nuclear contamination.

They called me to go help fight a fire on the aircraft carrier Independence, which was one of the target ships. We went up there three times."

Fighting the fire was hot work.

"Right after that, we all went swimming in the lagoon there," Smitherman said. "There were dead fish around there, lots of them, but they said,"Nothing to worry about, no harmful effects,' and there were not restrictions to us whatsoever."

Later he witnessed a second, and more powerful, blast, from the fantail from the Sumner.

"We got peppered with those little debris,"he said. "We were sittin' there -- I didn't have a T-shirt on, just shorts and tennis shoes."

For many of those veterans, it was years before medical problems they blame on that exposure began to surface. For Smitherman, the inklings came early.

"We were still out there when I began to get some burns on my feet and legs, about the size of silver dollars," he recalled.

Doctors on board the Sumner dabbed a little salve on them, but that was not enough. Seven months later he was hospitalized in Hawaii, and seven months after that he received a medical discharge from the Navy. They told Smitherman that kidney problems were causing his legs to swell.

For years -- according to Smitherman, his family and acquaintances -- the periodic swelling continued. Now the doctors say his lymph system has turned against him.

He traveled to Japan, where doctors in a Hiroshima hospital that specializes in treatment of radiation victims said there was no doubt that the exposure triggered his ills.

But the VA has continued to reject his disability claim. He figures if they granted his disability claim, dating back to 1977, it would mean a single lump-sum payment of about $30,000 and monthly checks slightly in excess of $1,000. More important, it would mean a small pension for his wife of 22 years once he is gone.

From The Oregonian Tuesday May 24, 1983

Excerpts from the book Operation Crossroads

The amount of radioactive material that collapsed back into Bikini's lagoon moments after the Baker shot was simply staggering. Unlike the Able blast, the fission products at Baker did not dissipate in the atmosphere. The water surrounding the bomb trapped most of the radioactive material and rained it down over the target vessels. As much as half the bomb's fission products remained in the lagoon's water or in the mist remaining in the air after the surge of spray fell back into the lagoon.

Scientists knew from studies of radium-dial workers that only a few millionths of a gram of radium lodged within human bones could prove fatal. Plutonium, the main component of the Baker bomb, has the same effect and is even more toxic. Test Baker, though, did not involve millionths of grams of radium, or even hundredths of grams. It created the equivalent of thousands of tons of radium. Within one hour of the blast, radiation levels in Bikini's lagoon reached the approximate equivalent of 5,000 tons of radium, which is 1 billion times the radioactivity from just one gram of radium Initial dose rates on the decks of target vessels closest to the blast exceeded 8,000 roentgens per day, 80,000 times the daily tolerance standard and 20 times more than a fatal dose.

During the first hour, wrote Ralph Sawyer, Crossroads's technical director, "the radiation was roughly equivalent to that from several thousand tons of radium." Even an hour after the shot the target ships a mile from Zeropoint showed a dose rate of 1,200 roentgens per day, more than three times the lethal dose, meaning that the daily tolerance dose would be reached in seven seconds.

Despite all the warnings that the highly radioactive column of water would come crashing down on the ships, absolutely no one-not even the radsafe section-had planned for the very disaster that had been predicted with amazing accuracy. As the navy admitted a few months later, "Since the nature and extent of contamination of the targets was completely unexpected, no plans had been prepared for organized decontamination measures."

For all its thousands of pages of detailed plans, the U.S. Navy managed to expose tens of thousands of men and more than 200 ships to radioactive contamination more than 2,000 miles from decent port facilities without ever having attempted experimentally to irradiate a ship or parts of one to determine how-or whether-a ship could be decontaminated.

The examination of the target ships-the very reason for Operation Crossroads-could not proceed if the vessels were too radioactive for reboarding and examination.

By Jonathan M. Weisgall