On a Farther Shore (31 page)

For the next several weeks, the
Lucky Dragon
made its way toward the Marshall Islands, first going south and then west. The fishing remained poor. By the end of February, they had brought in only 156 fish and some of the crew now regretted not listening to Misaki. A couple of hours before dawn on March 1, 1954, the long line was put over once again. The
Lucky Dragon
cut its engine and drifted silently on a calm sea beneath the stars and a few wandering clouds.

A crewman named Shinzo Suzuki woke up when the engine stopped and, unable to go back to sleep, went out onto the fantail of the ship. The morning air was warm and heavy. Scanning the dark horizon, Suzuki spotted the blinking light from a float on the long line. He was looking to the west when all at once a blinding wall of light burst into the sky and lit up the surface of the ocean. In seconds it went from searing white to yellow before changing again into a mix of yellow and orange and red, a monster light that Suzuki could
not stop looking at even as he began yelling to the crew that the sun had suddenly risen in the west. Sleepy and confused, the crew came on deck and stared gaping at the terrifying light, which grew dimmer but continued to spread and rise into the sky. Minutes went by. Then the
Lucky Dragon
, all ninety-nine tons of her, shivered and lurched as if the great weight of the thousands of feet of ocean beneath her keel had reached up and tapped the hull. In the same instant a roar like the end of the world passed over the ship, followed by two deep, concussive shock waves. Terrified, the crew flattened themselves on the deck. Nobody knew what was happening.

Misaki considered ordering the
Lucky Dragon
ahead at full speed in a direction away from the light. But he couldn’t bring himself to abandon the long line that was still in the water, even though he knew it hadn’t been out long enough for any kind of catch. While the crew began hauling in the line, the radio operator, a man named Kuboyama, made a hasty calculation. Guessing that the loud sound wave had hit the ship about seven minutes after they’d first seen the light in the sky, Kuboyama estimated that the
Lucky Dragon
was roughly eighty-seven miles from whatever had happened. As he looked at their position on a chart with Misaki, Kuboyama saw that there was nothing in that direction but a vast stretch of ocean and a few small piles of sand called Bikini atoll, which was eighty-five miles away.

Dawn came as the crew worked at retrieving the long line, but the sky was pale and strange. After a few hours what at first looked like a gentle snow began to come down, though the men quickly realized it wasn’t snow but something more like sand or maybe ash. It was gray and it coated everything. Some of the men thought it might be salt and a few of them picked up a pinch and tasted it. Misaki thought maybe it was volcanic dust and he again checked his charts to see if there was a volcanic island nearby that could have erupted or even exploded like Krakatoa. But he couldn’t find anything.

Whatever the gritty stuff falling out of the sky was, it continued to rain down on the ship, turning everything it touched a milky, sickly shade of gray. The
Lucky Dragon
started to look like an apparition.
The men tried to wash down the main deck and some of the fishing gear and found that the dust, which seemed heavier and stickier than either sand or salt, was hard to clean away. Some of the men complained of aching eyes, and later on others noticed that they weren’t hungry at mealtime. A couple felt nauseated. Just before midnight, Shinzo Suzuki, who’d been the first to see the frightening light, got out of his bunk to stand watch and promptly threw up.

The
Lucky Dragon
set its course for home. One by one, the crew fell ill. Their eyes hurt and were clogged with grit and an oozing, yellowish discharge. Suzuki could not get out of bed. The men felt their skin begin to itch and burn, especially the palms of their hands where they’d handled fishing lines covered with ash. Sores appeared on their skin, and they noticed that everyone looked as if they’d gotten a sunburn. Misaki thought there was something about the ash that wasn’t right, and he collected some—it was still all over the ship—and stored it in a bowl by his bunk so that somebody could investigate it when they got back to port. The radioman Kuboyama thought the same thing and put a sample of the ash wrapped in paper under his pillow. But nobody tried to get rid of the dust, which wasn’t just on the decks and the gear, but was now on everyone’s clothing and in their hair and in the galley where they ate.

As the
Lucky Dragon
neared Japan some of the crew found that their hair was falling out. Kuboyama, who everyone agreed was the best-educated man among the crew, regarded this latest symptom with alarm. He recalled that hair loss was one of the after-effects of exposure to radiation that had occurred in the bombings at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He met with Misaki and the two of them agreed that the whole crew should visit the hospital as soon as the
Lucky Dragon
made port. By the time they reached Yaizu harbor on March 14, 1954, the men looked terrible. Their “sunburns” had deepened to the point where their faces and hands looked blackened. Everybody was convinced the
Lucky Dragon
had wandered into the Pacific Proving Grounds, an area in the Marshall Islands that was restricted because of ongoing nuclear testing by the United States.

This was puzzling, as the restricted area was centered on Eniwetok atoll, which had been the site for all of the U.S. nuclear tests in the Pacific since two atomic bombs had been detonated at Bikini atoll in 1946. Eniwetok was three hundred miles west of the
Lucky Dragon
’s position on the morning of March 1, 1954. Somehow, nobody aboard the ship had gotten word that the restricted area had recently been extended far to the east in anticipation of a new series of tests at Bikini. Gradually it sunk in that what crew had seen that morning and what was now making them all sick could only have been one thing: an atomic bomb.

It turned out to be worse than that.

The
Lucky Dragon
never did enter the restricted area of the Pacific Proving Grounds, coming only within twenty miles of its eastern boundary—a position that should have been safe. What the ship ran into was not a line on a chart but rather the unintended consequences of a fierce arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union, combined with a horrific scientific miscalculation.

Experiments in nuclear fission, a chain reaction in which energy is produced by splitting the nuclei of heavy elements such as uranium or plutonium, had first been conducted in laboratories in 1939. It seemed likely that when the Manhattan Project was launched during World War II, the known principles of fission could be applied to building an atomic bomb. The certainty that Nazi Germany was working toward the same objective made development of a bomb all the more imperative.
But as early as 1922, scientists had also speculated that the release of energy through a thermonuclear fusion reaction with hydrogen as a fuel—essentially the same thing that happens inside the sun—could be used in an explosive device.
There were uncertainties, the most serious of which was the possibility that such an explosion might set off a chain reaction involving the light elements in the earth’s crust and atmosphere, instantaneously extinguishing all life and converting the planet into a star in an apocalyptic flash of light
and heat. Subsequent calculations suggested that such a catastrophic event was unlikely—though the matter needed further consideration as different kinds of fuels were contemplated. The eventual “good news” was that a self-propagating, earth-destroying chain reaction could not be initiated by a bomb because so much of the explosive energy would dissipate as radiation.

During World War II, the scientists with the Manhattan Project worked simultaneously on the development of both the atomic and the hydrogen bombs. Although the latter was still largely theoretical, some of the researchers argued it should be the main objective, with fission devices needed only as triggers for hydrogen bombs. But the atomic bomb won out. On August 6, 1945, an atomic bomb called “Little Boy” destroyed the city of Hiroshima, Japan. Three days later, “Fat Man” was dropped on Nagasaki. Tens of thousands died in both cities—most of them civilians who were incinerated or pulverized in the explosions—and many thousands more were sickened by radiation. Japan surrendered six days after the second bomb, and with the war at an end further development of a hydrogen bomb slowed.

But in August 1949, the Soviet Union, a onetime ally that had evolved into a potential enemy, successfully tested its own atomic weapon. The United States—fearing a hydrogen device might be next for the Russians—urgently renewed work on a thermonuclear bomb. The early prototypes were not practical weapons, as they used large amounts of supercooled liquid fuels and were the size of buildings.
The first explosive hydrogen device—it was far too big to be called a bomb—was detonated in a test called “Ivy Mike” on the tiny island of Elugelab, part of the Eniwetok atoll, on November 1, 1952. The initial fireball was more than three miles wide. It slowly transformed into a mushroom cloud twenty miles high and one hundred miles wide. An observation plane flying at 40,000 feet fifteen miles away detected a heat pulse on its wings of more than ninety degrees Fahrenheit. Elugelab was erased; in its place was a water-filled crater more than 160 feet deep and over a mile in diameter. When scientists examined debris from the blast they discovered that the periodic table
would have to be enlarged, as two new heavy elements—later named “einsteinium” and “fermium”—had been created in the nuclear inferno.

As impressive and frightening as Ivy Mike was, the Air Force demanded faster development of an “emergency capability” weapon, meaning one that could be produced efficiently and at a size small enough for delivery from a bomber. A practical bomb also had to be light enough that its descent could be slowed by a parachute after it was released in order to give the plane enough time to escape the ensuing blast.
A year and a half later, as the
Lucky Dragon
rode at ease on the dark Pacific swell east of the Marshall Islands, a new and compact “dry” device using isotopes of hydrogen and lithium as fuel sat waiting on a small patch of reef in the Bikini atoll. The test was named “Castle Bravo” and the device itself was called “Shrimp.”

The firing center for the Castle Bravo test was in a heavily reinforced bunker about 30 miles away, across the atoll’s central lagoon, on the island of Enyu. When the controller touched the trigger the sky itself seemed to explode in a hellish fireball that was visible more than 250 miles away. Moments after the blast, but before the sound from it reached Enyu, the bunker started to move. It took the men in the bunker a few seconds to realize that they were feeling the ground shock wave, which travels faster than sound travels through the air, but which nobody had ever experienced before because it was normally absorbed by the earth over a short distance. This was an indication that everything had not gone as planned—which was confirmed as the mushroom cloud above Bikini atoll shot through the troposphere and into the mid-stratosphere some 114,000 feet above the ground, taking with it many tons of hot, irradiated coral reef and sand. A number of other islands in the atoll were leveled and a change in the wind from southerly to westerly sent the immense cloud of radioactive “fallout” careening through the upper atmosphere to the east, where some of it would come back to earth on top of the
Lucky Dragon
and its crew. Within days it was determined that a large section of the northern portion of the Marshall Islands—an archipelago of
atolls and individual islands scattered over a thousand miles of ocean from east to west—was contaminated with radiation. Native inhabitants from several islands downwind of the test had to be evacuated.

Data collected during the test eventually showed that one of the Shrimp’s lithium isotopes that was expected to be inert instead amplified the fusion reaction, increasing the power of the device beyond what had been predicted. Castle Bravo was supposed to produce an explosion equal to six million tons of TNT. But Shrimp exploded with the power of fifteen million tons of TNT—two and a half times what had been expected and the equivalent of one thousand bombs the size of the one dropped on Hiroshima.

On its return to port, the
Lucky Dragon
and its unlucky crew became the object of intense curiosity and concern. The men were so dark they frightened people on the waterfront, and those with families were met with shock and disbelief at home. When the ship was inspected it was found to be contaminated with varying amounts of radioactivity—the highest levels being topside and on exposed gear. The
Lucky Dragon
was moved to quarantine on the opposite side of the harbor so it could be examined further before being burned at sea. Officials hastily tracked down the ship’s catch—which had already been auctioned off, mostly to fish markets in Osaka and Tokyo. They found the fish were also radioactive and had to be confiscated and buried.

Meanwhile, the crew, treated first by local doctors, then at more sophisticated facilities in Tokyo, grew more uneasy about their fate. The condition of the men puzzled medical authorities—who had plenty of experience with radiation sickness and who had the assistance of the American-run Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission in Hiroshima. The ABCC wasn’t a treatment facility, but a research organization that had been studying the aftereffects of the atomic attacks nearly a decade before. Yet no one who examined the men of the
Lucky Dragon
had seen symptoms like theirs.

Most of the crew seemed in good if less than robust health. Only Shinzo Suzuki had been too ill to work his watches on the return voyage, and although a number of crew members complained of poor appetites, it seemed unlikely that any of them had received lethal doses of radiation, as they would have been much sicker by then if they had. But the doctors were perplexed by the crew’s darkened skin and suppurating lesions. They were even more alarmed by the fact that the men were radioactive. Routine bathing and washing hadn’t completely removed the residue of the ash that had fallen from the sky onto the
Lucky Dragon
. Men who still had their hair—where by far the most radioactivity was detected—were shaved bald and scrubbed and rescrubbed until all the ash was removed. As the men’s dermatological symptoms improved, the doctors waited to see if they would become more ill before they got better, as this was typical in radiation exposure. And with one exception they did.