
America at the Atomic Crossroads - markmassie
http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/america-at-the-atomic-crossroads
======
phaefele
'Between 1946 and 1958, the equivalent of more than two hundred million tons
of TNT was detonated (on the inhabited Marshall Islands by the US Military) —
like a Hiroshima every day for almost forty years.'

...

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.

~~~
knowaveragejoe
Horrible indeed. Makes one wonder what the Soviets got up to when the US is
supposedly the "good guys".

~~~
bronson
They may have been just following our example.

'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.'

~~~
zeveb
> 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.

~~~
dghf
I'm in the middle of reading _Command and Control_ by Eric Schlosser: if it is
to be believed, then in the immediate wake of Hiroshima and Nagasaki there was
a widely held opinion (possibly approaching a consensus) _even among the upper
ranks of the US armed forces_ that atomic weapons should either be banned
outright or placed under the sole control of a world authority, maybe even a
world government.

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".

