The Nuclear Paper Trail
Tests, accidents, targets, experiments and a warning meant to last ten thousand years.
15 documents · 1946–2015 · 13 issuers
The nuclear age produced a vast technical literature, much of it declassified into databases that few people browse. These documents run from the first postwar test series to the question of how to warn our distant descendants, and they keep returning to the people downwind.
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1946: a target fleet, a lagoon, and the first lesson in fallout.
- 1946 QA-0032JTF-1 · Report
Operation Crossroads: atomic bomb tests Able and Baker at Bikini Atoll
Joint Task Force One's report on the July 1946 tests that exposed a fleet of target ships to two atomic detonations at Bikini Atoll.
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1954: Castle Bravo and the Marshallese who lived under its cloud.
- 1997 QA-0029BNL · Report
Historical events associated with fallout from Bravo Shot – Operation Castle, and 25 years of medical findings
Brookhaven National Laboratory's account of the March 1954 Castle Bravo test, whose yield far exceeded predictions and rained fallout on the inhabited atolls of Rongelap and Utirik.
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The same cloud reached U.S. weathermen on Rongerik.
- 1987 QA-0030DNA · Report
Analysis of radiation exposure: service personnel on Rongerik Atoll, Operation Castle – Shot Bravo
A 1987 Defense Nuclear Agency dose reconstruction for the U.S. weather-station crew on Rongerik Atoll, which the Bravo fallout cloud reached in 1954.
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What the bombs were for: SAC's 1959 target list.
- 1956 QA-0052SAC · Briefing book
Strategic Air Command declassifies nuclear target list from the 1950s
SAC's 'Atomic Weapons Requirements Study for 1959', the most detailed list of Cold War nuclear targets ever declassified: more than a thousand airfields and industrial sites across the Soviet bloc and China, with 'population' itself listed as a target in cities such as Moscow, Leningrad and East Berlin.
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1960: RAND asks who gets the bomb next.
- 1960 QA-0033RAND · Study
Diffusion of nuclear weapons to additional countries: the ‘nth country’ problem (RAND RM-2484)
A 1960 RAND study, done for the Air Force, of how and how fast nuclear weapons would spread beyond the first nuclear powers.
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Livermore tests the answer with three physicists and a library.
- 1967 QA-0054LLNL · Briefing book
The 1960s ‘Nth Country Experiment’ (Lawrence Livermore)
In the mid-1960s Livermore asked a few young physicists with no access to classified weapons data to design a nuclear bomb from open literature alone.
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Plowshare in Alaska: a harbor never blasted, a site still cleaned.
- 2015 QA-0034DOE-LM · Report
Final 2014 Remedial Action Report, Project Chariot, Cape Thompson, Alaska
Project Chariot was a 1958 plan to blast a harbor out of the Alaskan coast with nuclear explosives.
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Plowshare in New Mexico: nuclear fracking, 1967.
- 2011 QA-0035DOE-LM · Report
Gasbuggy Site Assessment and Risk Evaluation
Project Gasbuggy detonated a 29-kiloton nuclear device deep under New Mexico in 1967 to see whether nuclear blasts could free natural gas, an atomic precursor to fracking.
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A B-52, four bombs and the Greenland ice.
- 1969 QA-0128SAC · Official history
Project Crested Ice: The Thule Nuclear Accident, Vol. 1 (SAC Historical Study #113, 1969)
Strategic Air Command's official history of the January 1968 crash of a B-52 carrying four hydrogen bombs near Thule Air Base, Greenland, and of the cleanup of contaminated sea ice in the Arctic winter.
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The civilian road not taken: molten-salt reactors.
- 1966 QA-0028ORNL · Report
MSRE Design and Operations Report, Part VIII: Operating Procedures
The operating procedures for Oak Ridge's Molten-Salt Reactor Experiment, which ran from 1965 to 1969 (report ORNL-TM-908).
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The 1990s reckoning, branch by branch.
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The presidential committee's final word on human radiation experiments.
- 1995 QA-0036ACHRE · Report
Final Report of the Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments
The presidential committee report on Cold War radiation experiments on people, including plutonium injections into hospital patients without informed consent.
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Swords into ploughshares: Soviet warheads as American reactor fuel.
- 1993 QA-0125NRC · Memo
NRC: U.S. Purchase of Russian Highly Enriched Uranium Recovered From Nuclear Weapons (1993)
Nuclear Regulatory Commission material from 1993 on the U.S.–Russia agreement to buy uranium from dismantled Soviet warheads and blend it into reactor fuel.
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Proliferation in practice: watching India's program.
- 1974 QA-0055CIA · Briefing book
U.S. Intelligence and the Indian Bomb
Declassified U.S. intelligence estimates on India's nuclear program, from early capability assessments through the 1974 'Smiling Buddha' test to the 1998 Pokhran tests, which caught Washington by surprise.
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And finally: how to say 'danger' to someone in the year 12,000.
- 1993 QA-0026Sandia · Report
Expert judgment on markers to deter inadvertent human intrusion into the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant
Sandia report SAND92-1382: expert panels were asked how to warn people 10,000 years from now away from a nuclear waste repository in New Mexico, when no current language may survive.
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