Monitoring Distant Fallout

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Abstract
The fallout from test BRAVO in March 1954 has had scientific, political, and social implications that have continued for more than 40 years. The test resulted in serious injury to the people of the Marshall Islands and 23 men on a nearby Japanese fishing boat. Prior to BRAVO there was insufficient appreciation of the dangers of fallout to people living downwind from surface or near-surface explosions of megaton weapons. In the absence of sufficient preplanning for fallout monitoring beyond the test-sites of earlier smaller yield tests, and as a result of the concern of the photographic film manufacturers, the Atomic Energy Commission Health and Safety Laboratory, now the Department of Energy Environmental Measurements Laboratory, was requested to develop a program of fallout surveillance. Beginning with Operation IVY in 1952, these surveys included aerial monitoring of the islands of the mid and western Pacific, as well as establishment of fallout monitoring stations in the United States and abroad. The first evidence of the post-BRAVO fallout was detected by a Atomic Energy Commission Health and Safety Laboratory instrument installed on the atoll of Rongerik, where 28 military personnel were stationed. The results of radiation surveys conducted immediately after BRAVO, as well as the reports of medical investigations, radioecological studies, and dose reconstruction that have been conducted by many laboratories over the years have been available from the beginning in unclassified form. However, From the time of the fallout, and continuing to the present, there have been many unanswered questions about what happened during the hours immediately after the fallout was reported. No formal investigation of the circumstances of the fallout was ever conducted, and there were serious misrepresentations of the facts in the official statements made at the time.

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