THE AMERICAN EMPIRE AND THE COMING CLASS WAR----Episode 39

THE U. S. INCREASES ITS INVOLVEMENT IN VIETNAM

   Growing U.S. involvement in Vietnam was taking place against a backdrop of heightened nuclear tensions. In late February 1954, U.S. authorities evacuated islanders and cleared all vessels from a large area of the Pacific in preparation for a new series of hydrogen bomb tests. Even though the wind shifted, they decided to proceed as planned with the March 1 Bravo test, knowing that this would put many people in harm's way. To make matters worse, the bomb exploded with twice the force predicted. At 15 megatons, it was a thousand times more powerful than the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima. The cloud of radioactive coral drifted toward the Marshall Islands of Rongelap, Rongerik, and Utrik, contaminating 236 islanders and 28 Americans. Unaware of the danger, children played in the radioactive fallout. Many of the islanders were not evacuated for three days, by which time they were showing signs of radiation poisoning. Twenty-three fishermen aboard a Japanese trawler, Daigo Fukuryu Maru suffered a similar fate as they were blanketed by the deadly white ash that fell from the skies for three hours. When they pulled into a port thirteen days later with their contaminated tuna, crew members were showing signs of advanced poisoning. The first died several months later. 

The world was shocked by the United States' negligence and by the incredible power of the latest generation of nuclear weapons. Panic set in when people realized that the Japanese ship's contaminated tuna had been sold in four major cities and eaten by scores of people. Many people stopped eating fish entirely. Four hundred fifty-seven tons of tuna were eventually destroyed. AEC Chairman Lewis Strauss told the White House press secretary that the boat had really been a "red spy outfit" conducting espionage for the Soviet Union, a blatant lie that the CIA quickly dispelled. Speaking at Eisenhower's press conference, Strauss emphasized the test's contribution to the United States' "military posture." blamed the fishermen for ignoring AEC warnings, and downplayed the damage to their health. The inhabitants of Utrik were allowed to return within two months. The Rongalapese did not return home until 1957. They remained in Rongelap until 1985, when scientific findings confirmed their suspicions that the island was still contaminated. 

The international community was appalled. Belgian diplomat Paul-Henri Spaak warned, "If something is not done to revive the idea of the President's speech---the idea that America wants to use atomic energy for peaceful purposes ---- America is going to be synonymous in Europe with barbarism and horror." Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru said publicly that U.S. leaders were "dangerous self-centered lunatics" who would "blow up any people or country who came in the way of their policy." 

Eisenhower told the NSC in May 1954, "Everybody seems to think that we are skunks, saber-rattlers, and warmongers." Dulles added, "We are losing ground every day in England and in other allied nations because they are all insisting we are so militaristic. Comparisons are now being made between ours and Hitler's military machine." 

The bomb test had other unforeseen consequences. The terrifying power of hydrogen bombs and the slightly veiled threat of nuclear war now figured much more prominently in international diplomacy. The nuclear threat influenced the behavior of the major players at the Geneva Conference more than most people realized. Shortly after the test, Churchill told Parliament that the topic occupied his thinking "out of comparison with anything else." Dulles met with him in early May, afterward telling Eisenhower that he "found the British, and particularly Churchill, scared to death by the specter of nuclear bombs in the hands of the Russians." Anthony Eden connected this fear to the proceedings at the conference. "This was the first international meeting," he noted, "at which I was sharply conscious of the deterrent power of the hydrogen bomb. I was grateful for it. I do not believe that we should have got through the Geneva Conference and avoided a major war without it." 

The Lucky Dragon incident also catalyzed a worldwide movement against nuclear testing and popularized the previously obscure term "fallout." It sparked renewed questioning of Eisenhower's New Look. 

Nowhere was the reaction stronger than in Japan, where postwar U.S. efforts to censor discussion of the atomic bombings had not succeeded in extinguishing the memory of what the United States had done to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. A petition circulated by Tokyo housewives calling for banning hydrogen bombs gathered 32 million signatures, an extraordinary total representing one-third of the entire Japanese population. 

To counter this pervasive anti-nuclear sentiment, the NSC's Operations Coordinating Board proposed that the United States launch a "vigorous offensive on the non-war uses of atomic energy" and offer to build Japan an experimental reactor. AEC Commissioner Thomas Murray applauded this "dramatic and Christian gesture," believing it "could lift all of us far above the recollection of the carnage" of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Washington Post offered its hearty endorsement, seeing the project as a way to "divert the mind of man from its present obsession with the armaments race" and added, in an extraordinary admission, "Many Americans are now aware . . . that the dropping of the atomic bombs on Japan was not necessary. . . How better to make a contribution to amends than by offering Japan the means for the peaceful utilization of atomic energy. How better, indeed, to dispel the impression in Asia that the United States regards Orientals merely as cannon fodder ! " 

In what would seem the cruelest irony yet, Murray and Illinois Representative Sidney Yates proposed building the first nuclear power plant in Hiroshima. In early 1955, Yates introduced legislation to build a 60,000 kilowatt generating plant in the city that less than a decade earlier had been the first target of the atomic bomb. 

Over the next few years, the U.S. Embassy, the CIA, and the United States Information Agency waged a large-scale propaganda and educational campaign to reverse the Japanese people's deep-seated hostility to nuclear power. The Mainichi newspaper denounced the campaign : "First, baptism with radioactive rain, then a surge of shrewd commercialism in the guise of 'atoms for peace' from abroad." 

A month after the powerful Bravo test, the New York Times reported that the recent tests confirmed Szilard and Einstein's fear that the cobalt bomb could be built, leading to widespread discussion of Szilard's revised estimate that four hundred one-ton deuterium-cobalt bombs would release enough radioactivity to end all life on the planet. 

A front-page article in the Los Angeles Times two days later offered the sobering news that Japanese scientist Tsunesaburo Asada had informed the Japan Pharmacological Society that the Soviets were producing a nitrogen bomb ---a hydrogen bomb enclosed with nitrogen and helium ----so dangerous that "if 30 such bombs are detonated simultaneously all mankind will perish in several years' time." As if that weren't frightening enough, the following February, German Nobel Laureate Otto Hahn, the physicist who had first split the uranium atom, lowered the requisite number from four hundred cobalt bombs to ten in a radio broadcast that could be heard throughout most of Europe. 

Although a cobalt bomb was never built, the possibility that it could be gave shape to the decade's darkest nightmares. The Lucky Dragon crew members remained hospitalized for more than a year. While recuperating in the hospital, one issued a poignant warning : Our fate menaces all mankind. Tell that to those who are responsible. God grant that they may listen."