Command and Control

The fate of the Lucky Dragon was soon forgotten. But the Bravo test led to an alarming realization at the weapons laboratories, the Pentagon, and the White House: fallout from a hydrogen bomb was likely to kill far more people than the initial blast. At the Atomic Energy Commission, the fallout pattern from the Bravo test was superimposed on a map of the northeastern United States, with Washington, D.C., as ground zero. According to the map, if a similar 15-megaton groundburst hit the nation’s capital, everyone in Washington, Baltimore, and Philadelphia could receive a fatal dose of radioactivity. Residents of New York City might be exposed to 500 roentgens, enough to kill more than half of them. People as far north as Boston or even the Canadian border might suffer from radiation poisoning.

The British prime minister, Winston Churchill, was disturbed by the results of the Bravo test. Churchill had been an early proponent of defending Western Europe with nuclear weapons, not conventional forces. In 1952, Great Britain detonated a fission device, and its first atomic bomb, the “Blue Danube,” had recently been transferred to the Royal Air Force. The Blue Danube, with a yield of about 16 kilotons, now appeared minuscule and obsolete. “With all its horrors, the atomic bomb did not seem unmanageable as an instrument of war,” Churchill told the House of Commons a month after the Bravo test. “But the hydrogen bomb carries us into dimensions which… have been confined to the realms of fancy and imagination.” A small, densely populated nation would be especially vulnerable to such a weapon. Churchill asked William Strath, an official at the Central War Plans Secretariat, to lead a top secret study of what a thermonuclear attack would do to the United Kingdom.

Strath submitted his report in the spring of 1955, and its findings were grimly apocalyptic. According to the latest intelligence, a Soviet assault on the United Kingdom would have three main objectives: destroy the airfields hosting U.S. or British bombers, destroy the British government, and “render the UK useless as a base for any form of military operations.” That would be relatively easy to accomplish. “The heat flash from one hydrogen bomb,” the Strath report noted, “would start in a built-up area anything up to 100,000 fires, with a circumference of between 60 to 100 miles.” If the Soviets detonated ten hydrogen bombs along the west coast of the United Kingdom, the normally prevailing winds would blanket most of the country with fallout. Almost one third of the British population would be killed or wounded immediately. Most of the nation’s farmland would be rendered unusable for two months, some of the most productive land might “be lost for a long time,” and supplies of drinking water would be contaminated. In a section entitled “Machinery of Control,” the report warned that society would collapse in much of the United Kingdom. Local military commanders would be granted “drastic emergency powers,” and civil order might have to be restored through the use of “rough and ready methods.” Strath urged the government to release accurate information about the hydrogen bomb so that families could build fallout shelters, store canned foods, and prepare for the worst.

The Strath report was kept secret, its plea for greater openness ignored. Instead, Prime Minister Churchill ordered the BBC not to broadcast news about the hydrogen bomb that might discourage the public. Telling the truth about nuclear weapons, the British government feared, would weaken popular support for a defense policy that required them. Churchill had already chosen a different sort of response to the threat of thermonuclear war. “Influence depended on possession of force,” he told advisers, not long after the Bravo test. Great Britain would develop its own hydrogen bombs. Once again, the appeal of the H-bomb lay in its symbolism. “We must do it,” Churchill explained. “It’s the price we pay to sit at the top table.”

The Eisenhower administration also struggled with how to handle public fears of the hydrogen bomb. The head of the Atomic Energy Commission, Lewis Strauss, waited almost a year to acknowledge that the Bravo test had spread lethal fallout across thousands of square miles. While Strauss tried to limit publicity about the dangers of fallout, the Federal Civil Defense Administration (FCDA) conveyed a different message. Val Peterson, the head of the FCDA, advised every American family to build an underground shelter “right now.” Once the Soviets deployed their hydrogen bombs, Peterson added, “we had all better dig and pray.”