Sixty nine years ago, on this day, March 1, 1954, some folks got unlucky on the “Lucky Dragon”.
Aside from ratcheting up anxieties about the Cold War, peacetime tests of hydrogen bombs changed the way scientists around the world thought about the earth itself. It began when radioactive ash from a 1954 American nuclear test fell out of the sky and blanketed a Japanese fishing vessel, the Fukuryu Maru (Lucky Dragon). The crew was hospitalised, one man died, the fish market collapsed – and the chairman of the US Atomic Energy Commission, Lewis Strauss, unwisely blamed the Japanese for having been at the wrong place at the wrong time. The international incident introduced a new word to people around the world: fallout.
(Hamblin, 2013: 94-5)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daigo_Fukury%C5%AB_Maru
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 313ppm. As of 2023 it is 419ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was that the Americans and the Russians were, for separate reasons, blowing up atomic and hydrogen bombs in the atmosphere; for the lulz, and the military posturing, and the priesthood of defence intellectuals, etc. The Pacific is big, but not so big that some Japanese fishing boats didn’t wander into a fallout cloud as we would now call it.
What I think we can learn from this
It’s how the world got the word fallout, both as a literal and metaphorical device. It made people aware that the radiation could get everywhere. It probably was in the back of Neville Shute’s mind as part of the inspiration for On The Beach. And of course, once strontium 90 started accumulating in mother’s milk and baby’s teeth, everyone got the idea that technology could now have an influence, not just on a local, but on a global scale. (check out Project Sunshine)
What happened next
In the short-term, this was one more thing that was nudging Roger Revelle towards looking at carbon dioxide-
“Moreover, in 1954 fallout from an American thermonuclear test injured the crew of a Japanese fishing vessel and the entire Japanese nation became panicky about the safety of eating fish. Besieged by public anxieties, the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) stepped up its program of research on where fallout ends up in the environment.69 Revelle became involved in the problem as chair of a National Academy of Sciences committee assigned to study the effects of radioactive material on fisheries. Revelle himself was interested chiefly in the disposal of wastes. But he was also in touch with Libby, now at the AEC and heading its study of fallout, in connection with the contamination of surface waters by isotopes from bomb tests. Research on ocean mixing had become a topic of international importance “
Weart, 1997:343
In 1963, there was a test ban treaty. And so the boys with their toys started to do it underground.
What do you think? Does this pass the ‘so what?’ threshold? Have I got facts wrong? Interpretation wrong? Please do comment on this post, unless you are a denialist, obvs..
References
Hamblin, J. Arming Mother Nature
Weart, S. 1977