Experience the awe of witnessing the apocalypse come to life, as the moon turns red, the sky opens up and the ground shakes!
"It was so dramatic and so moving that I actually for a moment thought I should turn around and see if there was a guy in a robe writing this all down for later writing on the apocalypse." - Jim Burkhart
Jim Burkhart is a retired physicist from the University of Colorado and founder of the Radon Measurement Lab. He was one of the first graduates of the university's physics department and was back on campus to receive the Maurice O. Graff Distinguished Alumni Award. He was part of the US Air Force's Operation Dominic and witnessed the detonation of eleven hydrogen bombs.
Jim Burkhart had just turned 20 when he was sent to Johnson Atoll to take part in Operation Dominic, the nuclear tests. He witnessed the launch of 5 successful Titan missile launches and 6 airdrops of hydrogen bombs. On July 8th, he was sent to an old ship off the coast while they launched a missile and waited for the blast. When it went off, a bright light filled the sky and the whole atmosphere was lit up with a spectrum of colors. Jim was deeply moved by the apocalyptic scene and for a moment wondered if someone was writing it all down for later. The electromagnetic pulse from the high-altitude explosion was confirmed and the devastation of radiation on the island was revealed.
In this episode, you will learn the following:
1. A firsthand account of witnessing the devastating effects of radiation and its long-term consequences.
2. A vivid description of a hydrogen bomb test with its accompanying magnetic field lines, aurora borealis, and Tesla coil-like snap.
3. An eerie recollection of experiencing an apocalypse-esque scene with the moon turning red, the sky opening up, and the ground shaking.
Production costs for this episode were provided through National Science Foundation Grant PHY-2011267.
Jim Burkhart 00:00:04
And I was watching all of this happen and my brain turned to the apocalypse, where the writer of the apocalypse talks about the end of the world, saying that the moon turns red, the sky opens up and the ground shakes, and all of that was happening. I actually, for a moment, thought I should turn around and see if there was a guy in a robe writing this all down.
Shelly Lesher
Welcome to another episode of my nuclear life. I'm Shelly Lesher. After the Trinity test in 145. The US. Conducted over a thousand nuclear tests. In a previous episode, we heard how citizen science and baby teeth helped to end above ground nuclear testing. And the Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty was signed in July of 1963. It specifically banned nuclear testing underwater in the atmosphere or in outer space. Did you ever think the in outer space was a bit of an odd place to add? Our guest today tells a story that scared many, many people. In 1962, a series of nuclear tests began, which were codename Operation Dominic and included weapons tested in low and high altitude and underwater. The five high altitude tests were distinguished by a separate code name, operation Fishbowl. The largest of these high altitude tests was called Starfish Prime. This is the shot that scared people and is the most memorable, and you'll see why today. My guest is Jim Burkhart, a retired physicist from the University of Colorado and founder of the Radon Measurement Lab. He was one of the first graduates of my physics department and was back on campus to receive the Maurice O. Graff Distinguished Alumni Award. While here, he met with students and discussed his time in the Air Force. Here is his story.
Shelly Lesher
00:02:29
You might be one of the last of a handful of people that's still alive that witnessed an above ground nuclear test.
Jim Burkhart
00:02:38
That's true. And that would be for a couple of reasons. First of all, I was relatively young. I just turned 20 just prior to the beginning of the testing. So I was one of the youngest people on the island, johnson island, where the test happened, sometimes called Johnson Atoll. And secondly, radiation was pretty devastating there, especially for the pilots and those of us who were on the island during some of the mishaps. And I know from personal encounters with people in here in Colorado Springs who were on the test sequence with me that cancer, special leukemia, none hodgkins was very prevalent. And that's the second reason that there probably are not many survivors. Although I will be honest, I haven't put out a newspaper request or anything else to actually see how accurate that statement is. I'm just using common sense.
Shelly Lesher (host)
Right. So I want to go back to you mentioned Johnson Island or Johnson Atoll. So where is that exactly?
Jim Burkhart
00:03:54
Yes, if you can picture the Hawaiian Islands and the large island of Wahu and mentally goes southwest of that, about 1000 miles and there with Johnson Island of Pacific, it was not part of the Christmas Island chain, so that was much further south, south of the equator. This is actually north of the equator, a few degrees.
Shelly Lesher (host)
And what was life like? How long were you on Johnson Island?
Jim Burkhart
00:04:23
I was there for a full year, literally from March 17, which is St. Patrick's Day, and that was from 1962. And I left the island on March 17, so I was there for a full year.
Shelly Lesher (host)
00:04:40
So you were there pretty much for the full Dominic testing series, the part.
Jim Burkhart
00:04:47
Of the Dominic series which occurred on Johnson Island there I was there for all of it. I saw all the airplanes.
Shelly Lesher (host)
00:04:55
Wow.
Jim Burkhart
00:04:55
And I saw all of the Thorn missile launches. Yes.
Shelly Lesher (host)
00:05:00
Okay, I'm a little surprised here, so let me do some linear question asking. What was kind of day to day life like? I mean, you were there for a year. There was a lot of action going on with all of these tests, it seems. I mean, there were 31 tests that year, so there was a lot of action happening. So what was life like on a day to day basis?
Jim Burkhart
Well, first of all, Operation Dominic also happened in Christmas Island. So some of those tests, the 31 that you're talking about were not on or near Johnson Island.
Shelly Lesher (host)
00:05:34
Okay.
Jim Burkhart
00:05:35
In fact, one of them was actually off the coast of California, an underwater one. So to put things in perspective, there were five successful Titan missile launches while I was there, and I saw probably six airdrops. So I witnessed roughly eleven hydrogen bombs go off. And what was life like? Well, of course, as you said, it was very busy sometimes, especially during the four missile launches, because that involved a lot of people on the island, civilian personnel coming in from California, for example. So the missile being prepared, the actual launch, the hydrogen bomb going off. But actually between shots, a lot of those people were evacuated from the island, and life was pretty boring. It was a hot island, all coral, very little green, a couple of palm trees. I did have an NCO club, and I played guitar at the NCO club and drank beer at the NCO club.
Shelly Lesher (host)
00:06:55
Yeah, if there wasn't much to do, that's something to do.
Jim Burkhart
Actually, it was pretty casual in our uniforms. I wore a T shirt and Air Force shorts, and I swam almost every day right off the western side of the island where the sharks didn't come, and did a lot of scuba diving. I had part time jobs working in the PX because I was an electronics guy and folks wanted to buy a lot of audio recorders and radios and stuff like that. So I was always the person who would help them out. I also worked in the movie theater and sold tickets and run the projector, and I read a lot. I was, and still am an avid reader. And so that's how my days passed. And then, of course, as we got near a shot, things got very busy.
Shelly Lesher (host)
Were you part of the Joint Task Force Eight?
Jim Burkhart
00:07:56
Joint, yes, that's correct.
Shelly Lesher (host)
00:07:59
Okay.
Jim Burkhart
00:08:00
I was part of the Air Force contingent. So the Air Force ran the control tower, bringing planes in and out, which was near shot time, very busy. I was the repair person for the transmitters that used that to talk to the pilots and also the transmitters that were ran during the actual blasts. And we can go into that later why that was happening. There was then a receiver section, and the receivers were, of course, as the name would imply, the equipment and operators who picked up the reception. And they were in a different building far from the transmitter shop, so there was no crosstalk with our transmitting towers. And they were Air Force. So that's three transmitter, receiver, control power, and that was basically most of it. So we were not actually blowing up the bombs ourselves, but we were on island or on an aircraft carrier during the blast, having gone into protection on island or being taken by Marine helicopter to the carrier prior to the blast and returned to the island after the blast. And I have some interesting stories about that too, as a matter of fact. So I was an electronic technician.
Shelly Lesher (host)
So you made sure that everything on the island was maintained between the blasts and then kept the transmitters and receivers and control tower in use and maintained during the blast and as people came in and out.
Jim Burkhart
00:09:56
Okay, all of that's accurate except during the blast, there was nobody in the control tower.
Shelly Lesher (host)
Okay.
Jim Burkhart
00:10:05
Other than that. Yes. I was frequently called out of the dorm. Actually, it was barracks in the middle of the night. If a plane was coming in, they were having trouble communicating with them. So I'd have to walk over the control towers. He was wrong there. Go over to the shop, he was wrong there, and so on.
Shelly Lesher (host)
00:10:24
How many people were there on island all year?
Jim Burkhart
00:10:29
Okay. Permanent duty was probably limited to several hundred, maybe 300 people. Prior to the shots. It was several thousand.
Shelly Lesher (host)
00:10:40
Wow, that's a substantial uptick.
Jim Burkhart
It was very crowded. Very crowded.
Shelly Lesher (host)
And what other people came in? You had mentioned a Marine helicopter. I'm assuming scientists came. There were probably some politicians that wanted to watch the shot.
Jim Burkhart
I don't think so, no. The California think tank was responsible for the shots, and you're right.
Shelly Lesher (host)
Well, the AEC would have been involved.
Jim Burkhart
00:11:06
Atomic Energy Commission.
Shelly Lesher (host)
Yeah.
Jim Burkhart
00:11:08
Yes, there was definitely a handful of those folks. Have a good story you tell about that, too.
Shelly Lesher (host)
Oh, probably Livermore was there. Or Los Alamos.
Jim Burkhart
Yes. Lawrence Livermore, Jet Propulsion Laboratory. That's what I'm saying.
Shelly Lesher (host)
But no politicians had made their way. They weren't interested at that time.
Jim Burkhart
00:11:25
No, there was a general or two, and that's about as high fluting as it got.
Shelly Lesher (host)
00:11:30
I'm sure that was fine with you. No highfalutin people coming around.
Jim Burkhart
Now, during the most active part of the test series, from June of 62 to perhaps August of September, there were a dozen people assigned to the transmitter shop when the test series was finished and cleaning up and stuff was being done. Actually, I was the highest ranking person in the transmitter shop, and I was what was called airman in charge AIC. And there was only one other guy, and he was an airman second. So it was very quiet there for most of 63 until I left in March. So it was pretty boring, as a matter of fact.
Shelly Lesher (host)
No, when you're on an island that explodes nuclear weapons, I think boring is good.
Jim Burkhart
Right. So let's concentrate on the real fun stuff.
Shelly Lesher (host)
00:12:31
Yeah, I mean, fun is an air closure, right? So what was the first test that you were part of? Like, what was the first explosion that you saw?
Jim Burkhart
In fact, that's the one that I want to concentrate this on, because that is the one I discussed mostly with the students and that they found interesting. So to give you a little background, the test series, Operation Dominic Starfish, which was the Thor missiles, started or was intended to start in June of 1962. However, Starfish, the first attempt the radar on the island, lost the missile, didn't know where it was, and so the range officer destroyed the missile and the warhead because it was determined that it would not be a good idea to let the hydrogen bomb go off when they didn't know where it was. The pieces of the Thor end of the plutonium morehead these were all plutonium Moreheads, by the way, fell back into the ocean. Eventually, the location was found, and many of the thorough missile pieces and warhead debris were picked up from the ocean bottom around Johnson Island by Navy divers.
Shelly Lesher (host)
When you say that the missile couldn't be found on radar, and then they decided to destroy it, so all of these missiles had an internal destruction system so that you could remotely destroy them?
Jim Burkhart
Yes, exactly.
Shelly Lesher (host)
Okay.
Jim Burkhart
It was designed to basically blow up the missile and at the same time, to separate the fission material so that there would not be an accidental blast, which, of course, is initially an atomic bomb that sets off the hydrogen bomb.
Shelly Lesher (host)
So, ideally, the fissionable material would stay more or less whole.
Jim Burkhart
It would be spread out all over the place.
Shelly Lesher (host)
Oh, that doesn't sound good.
Jim Burkhart
No, and it's not.
Shelly Lesher (host)
Okay, so the Navy divers go to find it. That doesn't sound like a safe mission.
Jim Burkhart
It gets worse. So the second one was in July, and it again was a Thor missile shot intended to be high altitude, several hundred miles up. And I should point out that the personnel on the island, including me, were put into an old ship that had been moved up to the south shore by the beach. In fact, a month was spent dredging sand out and coral so we could get there. This was an old freighter, a heavy metal thing, and we would go into the hold. And that was for exactly that reason. If a missile had to be destroyed and the parts came raining down on the island, we would be protected from the metal and stuff. It was not intended to protect us from an accidental hydrogen bomb test that would have been no good at all.
Shelly Lesher (host)
So where were you then when the first missile was exploded in the hold of the ship? So for both of them, you were in the hold?
Jim Burkhart
Actually, I haven't got to the second one, but yes. Okay. So the second one, the Thorn missile, took off and didn't get very high and did not get on its southwest trajectory. They were trying to blow the bombs up a little southwest of Johnson Island and that was to get it further away from Hawaii because they didn't want accidental blinding of people on Hawaii. And we'll talk more about that in a few minutes. In fact, the missile went straight up because the range officer destroyed that one and it landed right back on the island. And so as the all clear was given and I left the hold of the old ship, I walked past the landing field of Tarmac back to the barracks and walked past pieces of the missile and presumably of the warhead too, although it was dark and I couldn't see smaller stuff. But I saw the engines of the thor. In fact, one of them went right through one of the airplanes, the submarine Chasers PB something or another that were there because the Russians were there. And we had these submarine airplanes flying around with their radar watching for the Russians, actually. So we didn't actually kill them. We could see the subs, by the way, the Russian subs from the control power.
Shelly Lesher (host)
I was going to ask you. I had read that the Soviets were nearby and I wondered if you guys knew that they were they were very.
Jim Burkhart
Close, certainly within 2 miles. 3 miles, yeah.
Shelly Lesher (host)
Oh, wow. So they were not hiding at all.
Jim Burkhart
Oh, no. We could see them easily with the red star on the cunning tour with our binoculars. Okay, so that was the second dud.
Shelly Lesher (host)
Okay, so still no blast yet. This hasn't worked.
Jim Burkhart
Nothing. No blast. Okay. The third one was on July 8, about 10:00 at night. Again, I was back in the hold of the ship. And this one went up about 250 miles, 400. In fact, it went higher than that because what they wanted to do was shoot it up way past like 700. Then as it dropped back down, they could press the button right at the altitude they wanted, of course, with the help of the radar. And so we had some time after the launch was finished and there was no danger of us being hit by missile debris to get off of the ship, off of a gangplank and onto the beach where we then would sit down and have high density goggles on, which were very, very dark goggles, like you would wear skiing, except it didn't allow any light through. Basically, you could look directly at the sun with it, but you could not look at a hydrogen bomb with it. So we also had to put our arms crossed in front of us, crouched down with our hands on our knees, and then put the eyes with the goggles onto our arms. All of that was to stop the light.
Shelly Lesher (host)
Why didn't they just leave you in the hold of the ship?
Jim Burkhart
Basically because it was extremely interesting to be out. Yeah.
Shelly Lesher (host)
Okay.
Jim Burkhart
00:20:01
They had no idea how long the display would last. And so if we went, we were in the ship when the bomb went off. It could have been that by the time we got off the ship, the whole show would be over. That isn't what happened.
Shelly Lesher (host)
So it was more of like a firework display interest instead of protecting you from radiation.
Jim Burkhart
Oh, definitely. You guys want to see this. Get your butts out here, sit down and get into this position, but don't look at it. And there was, of course, speakers that were telling us all of this. My first little story off to the side about the flash.
Shelly Lesher (host)
So did the third one go off?
Jim Burkhart
Yes. Not yet. I'm still on the island. I'm still crouched down.
Shelly Lesher (host)
You're still crouched down?
Jim Burkhart
Yeah.
Shelly Lesher (host)
Okay. The Thor missile had gone up. It's on its way down. You guys rushed to the way down. You rushed to the beach. You got your goggles. You're sitting down in your position. You got your heads down.
Jim Burkhart
Okay, you're doing good.
Shelly Lesher (host)
Okay.
Jim Burkhart
Unbeknownst to me, at the time, one of the guys in my shop, tech sergeant, was still on the gangplank when the bomb went off. And unfortunately, he was torn between having his goggles down, in which case he couldn't see where he was going, and he was afraid of falling and having his goggles up either held up or on his forehead so he could see. And he decided to take a peek, and he picked his goggles up to see where he was, and that's when the bomb went off. Now, the flash of the initial explosion at 258 miles was bright enough that the reflection off of the beach and water blinded him. And he was one of a couple of people blinded and the only one who was permanently blinded from just the reflection from a hydrogen bomb going off 250 miles away. So what we learned, unfortunately, with his help, was that in the event of a nuclear war, there are going to be a lot of people who are blinded even at a high altitude hydrogen bomb, which is of dismatitude by the way it was, 1.4 megatons. And to give you a perspective on that, the original Ferocima bomb was 16 kilotons. So this is three orders of magnitude more. Okay. Anyway, going back now to what I was witnessing.
Shelly Lesher (host)
So 20 year old Jim is on the beach, head down.
Jim Burkhart
I'm checking. I'm 21 now.
Shelly Lesher (host)
You're a little bit more mature at this point.
Jim Burkhart
No, not a bit, but I am 21. I turned 21 in April, 15, as a matter of fact. Okay. So the bomb went off, and there was a snap instantaneous, very similar to an electrical discharge, like your Tesla coil would give you, or your van de Graf machine. And we were warned, however, not to look up or remove our goggles. And so I kept down in that position for quite a while, wasn't able to look at my watch, but it certainly was like five minutes, maybe even ten. And then we were told we could look up, but we had to keep our goggles on. So I did that. I looked up and there was a very bright object, much like the sun would be. I looked at that. It wasn't very interesting, but it was a large ball. So eventually we were told we could take our goggles off. And then I saw something I have never seen since. But the whole sky, by the way, the fireball was up about 80 degrees up, not directly overhead, and it went to the southwest. The whole sky was like an aurora borealis, only permeated everything. The colors around you were all the same color at the time, went through the spectrum at the time it started blue, quickly went into the cooler parts of yellow and eventually to the red part of the spectrum. And when it got to the red part of the spectrum, it was most eerie because your hands were red, the beach was red, the sky was red. It turned out there was a moon up. It was red. And the electrons released during the hydrogen fusion part and then followed later by the heavier ions, raced along the magnetic field lines north and south from the fireball with a green color. And I learned later that both of those terminated where the magnetic field lines entered the ocean, north south of us. But at the time, it looked completely like the sky was opening up off to my right, and behind me, the sounding missiles were being fired. Several dozen sounding missiles were along the landing field. They were much like our Nike missiles nowadays, but they were to collect data, debris especially, and they went up very, very high and reentered the atmosphere. The pods reentered the atmosphere and glowed so it looked like stars falling almost in slow motion, meteorites on it from the sky. Now, I skipped over one part, and that was my training prior to joining the Air Force. I was right out of high school, except for tech school and basic training and I went to a seminary in Lacrosse, Wisconsin, holy Cross Seminary, which at the time was located on South Avenue. And the building is still there. I think it has a different use now, but at the time it was a very active seminary and I went there for my high school years. So I was basically fresh out of the seminary and I was watching all of this happen and my brain turned to the Apocalypse, where the writer of the apocalypse talks about the end of the world, saying that the moon turns red, the sky opens up and the ground shakes. And all of that was happening. And it was so dramatic and so moving that I actually for a moment thought I should turn around and see if there was a guy in a robe writing this all down for later writing on the apocalypse. There was not. Oh my, yeah, but that's, of course, when the electromagnetic pulse for high altitude explosions was confirmed and they learned that the very high altitude ones have very strong electromagnetic pulses and I can tell you personally that you can hear the electromagnetic pulse. And I learned later where responsible or that bomb was that was responsible for considerable damage up in Honolulu where communications, some radios were knocked off, streetlights were knocked off because circuit breakers were all shot. Also radio communications that uses a skip from the ionosphere were knocked off, which of course we were part of with remote transmitter receivers around the world. And so my understanding is that the United States decided to use high altitude bombs as the initial part of any subsequent wartime in order to knock out communications disrupt satellites. By the way, several satellites at that time were knocked off immediately and went off the air within a couple of months, blind people and knock out utilities. Now, I have no idea if that is still a part of the United States defense, but it certainly evolved after that time, for a while at least.
Shelly Lesher (host)
This is Starfish Prime, right?
Jim Burkhart
Yes, Starfish Prime. That's correct.
Shelly Lesher (host)
So I have a couple of questions going back to the shot. You gave this great description of what it looked like and when you said at the beginning that there was kind of this crack like a vandograph, do you mean that it sounded that way or that it looked that way? It was like that audible kind of like crack or it felt that way. Like there was like this electric no.
Jim Burkhart
You can hear it. It was the sound, absolutely. And of course it was the EMP.
Shelly Lesher (host)
So what did it feel like? You said the ground shook, but was there any other kind of feeling in the air?
Jim Burkhart
No.
Shelly Lesher (host)
00:30:13
Was anyone talking or everybody just kind of standing in awe?
Jim Burkhart
Everyone was in awe, yeah. Now, of course, for the first few minutes I didn't see anybody else. I had my goggles on. Yes. Afterwards. I mean, it was the lightest day, literally. It was like a bright, sunny day for a while until it went through that yellow and got into the red. And you could see all the other guys standing around. By the way, to say guys is not inaccurate. There were no women on the island for any of this except they'd come down to play a ukulele or something for a weekend and we'd go watch the show. But there were no permanently established women on island ever for this. Yeah, everyone was very quiet. It was quite a moving show.
Shelly Lesher (host)
Yeah. Wow. And was there any taste to it? Because I know in some bombs people said that they tasted metallic.
Jim Burkhart
No, I didn't taste anything.
Shelly Lesher (host)
Wow. So that was your first experience?
Jim Burkhart
That's correct. And as I told you, the sounding rockets going off continuously. There were a lot of them. I didn't stop and count them when I walked by the airstrip, but there were at least two dozen of them. And so they were going off like every 15 seconds. And that island was very small. The whole island is only 5000ft long at the time, a mile long and about a quarter of that wide. So when those rockets took off, it was shaking. You could hear them very clear. And that was the only noise, though. There was no noise coming from the fireball at all.
Shelly Lesher (host)
Wow.
Jim Burkhart
00:32:01
Yeah, it was too high. It was outside the atmosphere for all practical purposes.
Shelly Lesher (host)
So you gave the Soviets a good show?
Jim Burkhart
Oh, yeah. I'm sure they got almost as much information out of it as we did, probably.
Shelly Lesher (host)
What was the most shocking story that you have from the island?
Jim Burkhart
I saw two more Thors. They were both lower, and one was actually I was on the USS Ima Jima for that one. For the other two. Okay, so the next one I want to talk about is another Dud, only this one gets a little more personal. So I was on the Ima Jima, which is, by the way, it's a Navy carrier, but it's a helicopter ship, not fixed wing. And we were taken off island onto the Iwo Jima by the Marines who flew the helicopters. Since we were far enough away from the island to not worry about debris falling on us, we were actually on the flight deck when the rocket took off. We could witness it without goggles or anything else. Not the bomb going off, but the rocket going off.
Shelly Lesher (host)
Okay.
Jim Burkhart
This is about the fourth floor. I skipped the third one to get to this one. Successful. Okay. So this one, I would guess we were like 10 miles off the island but could easily see everything happening there. The thor lit up, getting ready to take off and just sat there. And you could hear everybody saying there were probably like 3400 guys on the flight deck. You could hear everybody saying, oh, doesn't look good. And sure enough, there was a huge explosion. Not a nuclear explosion but a chemical from the island where the thor was blown up on the launch pad. Now that's interesting because the launch pad was less than 100 yards from my transmitter building. Much less. More like 100ft from my transmitter building. So in the morning in light, the Marines took us back to the island, dropped us off and the Atomic Energy Commission was there and they had large plastic bags and rubber gloves. And as we got off the helicopter they would hand each of us a pair of gloves in a large plastic bag and they would say go around and pick up anything that doesn't look like coral.
Shelly Lesher (host)
No thank you.
Jim Burkhart
That was because the bomb had blown up on the island. The pieces of the fish and above material were all over the southern part of the island.
Shelly Lesher (host)
Oh my gosh.
Jim Burkhart
And I said yes sir. And I took the plastic bag and the gloves and walked to the barracks and shut the door to my room. I was only 21 but I wasn't stupid. And I protected myself that day but not entirely for life because after a brief cleanup we were allowed back in the transmitter shop. And I know for a fact that to this day that that is off limits with fences around it and a big hill which buried because they couldn't pick up all of the little teeny plutonium particles. So they brought in bulldozers. And Johnson Island now has a hill which I saw on a video. Anybody can see it by putting Johnson Island into their search engine. And look for a recent video from Johnson Island. It's a bird sanctuary. Now by the way. All of those buildings, the transmitters, the receivers, the theater, the NCO club they're all gone. They flattened everything in order to keep the follow up personnel safe. They buried all of that stuff. But not when I was there. Now I'm skipping the airdrops because they weren't that interesting.
Shelly Lesher (host)
First I was going to ask there were some airdrops. How did they differ from the high altitude tests?
Jim Burkhart
They were dropped from B 52s mostly. One was from a Polaris missile and I think one was from a Nike. I didn't keep track of all that but basically they were closer to that water within oh I don't know. I think you could probably find that out yourself by looking up Operation Dominate. My guess it will be within 1000 meters of the surface. So because they were far enough away we didn't get to see the mushroom cloud and they were all done at night or early morning.
Shelly Lesher (host)
Oh so they weren't very interested.
Jim Burkhart
No, it was a bright flash basically which we did not need our goggles on. And so we knew when it was going to go because the loudspeaker was telling us and it would say look to the blah blah. Usually it was back east and there would be a bright flash. And that would be it. Now, I got up for all of them, but there was nothing that interesting.
Shelly Lesher (host)
Nothing like the first one.
Jim Burkhart
Yeah, I'm skipping another one, but the other ones would sort of be a repeat of what I've already said, except one was so low it knocked us down. Those of us who were standing up on the iwaJima actually got knocked over.
Shelly Lesher (host)
Oh, wow. So it was close enough from the sonic boom?
Jim Burkhart
From the sonic boom, yeah. And so I have a framed certificate from the Department of Defense saying that I am an atomic veteran because I received radiation during the atomic bomb test and that in two and a half bucks will get me a cup of coffee.
Shelly Lesher (host)
Aren't you covered, then, under the federal bill to no, but it says you're an atomic veteran.
Jim Burkhart
There is no coverage for atomic veterans. The only coverage for radiation is the people who were downwind during the Nevada tests, who were civilians. I guess Congress and the President has decided that that was part of our agreement by joining up in the service and following orders to go to Johnson Island.
Shelly Lesher (host)
I was going to say they didn't ask you if you wanted to go and be exposed to radiation.
Jim Burkhart
In retrospect, it's an experience that I wouldn't have wanted to miss. It was life changing.
Shelly Lesher
Thank you for listening. And a very special thanks to Jim. We spoke more about how he got into physics and his work on radon, but that will be for another episode. Please leave us a rating or review on Apple podcast or wherever you are able. Visit us at My Nuclearlife.com for more information about our podcast. Until next time, I'm Shelly Lesher and this has been my nuclear life.
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