THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Thursday, August 3, 1995 TAG: 9508030606
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A1 EDITION: FINAL
SERIES: THE ATOMIC AGE TURNS 50
SOURCE: BY BILL SIZEMORE, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Long : 155 lines
When Ronald Butler was a young sailor, the government decided to use his ship for target practice.
The weapon of choice was one unparallelled in its destructive power: the atom bomb.
It was 1946, a year after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the government wanted to learn more about what this exotic new weapon could do.
Butler was an enlisted man aboard the Gasconade, an amphibious troopship. It was anchored in a circle with a group of other designated target ships off Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands.
The crew was transferred to another ship, the Bexar, and moved several miles away to watch the spectacle.
The first test bomb was exploded in the air above the circle of ships.
``We had to sit down on the deck like this,'' Butler recalled, dropping his head between his legs. ``Then, as soon as the flash was over, we looked up and saw the cloud. It was yellow and white. They called it `peaches and cream.' You could see the fire. You could see it burning all the way up, almost as high as you could see.''
The bomb's effect on the ships was dramatic.
``It melted a whole lot of superstructure,'' Butler said. ``You could see that stuff - it was just bent all over and melted.''
After the first blast, the Gasconade's crew was brought back aboard for a while, then moved off again for an underwater detonation. That one sank seven of the target ships, by Butler's count.
Butler, 73, retired and living in Norfolk, is one of some 250,000 former U.S. service members deliberately exposed to nuclear test explosions by the government between 1945 and 1963. Another 200,000 were sent to Hiroshima and Nagasaki for occupation and cleanup duties.
Their story is a legacy of the atomic age whose magnitude is only now being measured.
Advocates for these veterans say they are dying prematurely in large numbers, usually of cancer, and in many cases suffered damage to their reproductive systems that caused birth defects and chronic illnesses in their children.
One of Butler's three children, a daughter, was born with a hole in her heart and was in and out of hospitals all her life. She had open-heart surgery at 23 and died at 37 of heart and lung ailments.
Her daughter, Butler's granddaughter, developed cancer in her fallopian tubes that led to a hysterectomy when she was 24.
In addition, Butler and both his daughters have long suffered strange seizure-like episodes in which their vision is impaired and they are temporarily unable to speak. The condition has mystified doctors.
The National Association of Atomic Veterans, a lobbying group, has begun tracking the deaths of veterans involved in nuclear tests. So far, the group's research has found a cancer death rate of 78 percent. The median age at death among those studied was 56 - about 20 years younger than among the general population.
After years of agitation by veterans and survivors, Congress adopted legislation in 1988 listing 13 types of cancer as presumptively radiation-induced, qualifying atomic veterans with those ailments for compensation.
But veteran advocates say that the legislation is interpreted narrowly and that in too many cases, the government has turned its back on men it deliberately placed in harm's way.
A recurring theme in these veterans' stories is that they were kept in ignorance before, during and after their exposure.
Butler's story is typical.
``They didn't tell us very much,'' he said. ``They didn't tell us anything until we were already over there.
``It definitely wasn't volunteer work. . . . We had no say whatsoever in it. We were guinea pigs, that's what we were.''
Ray Jeffers, another Navy enlisted man, watched an A-bomb test off Eniwetok Atoll, also in the Marshall Islands, in 1948. In 1980, he died of bronchogenic carcinoma - cancer of the bronchial tubes. He was 52.
His widow, Donna Jeffers of Virginia Beach, has been trying for 15 years to get his death ruled service-connected, to no avail.
His cancer had not shown up when he was discharged from the Navy in 1964, and it is not one of the 13 cancers considered presumptively radiation-related - although it was included in an early version of the legislation.
Jeffers was a smoker. But his widow is convinced that radiation, not tobacco, was the reason he died at such a young age.
The couple had two children in college at the time.
``We had planned to have a little time after the kids got out of college to build a nest egg,'' Donna Jeffers said.
``What I've gone through in the last 15 years is like a dog chasing its tail.''
She wants compensation, but even more than that, she said, ``I want the government to apologize to me. I want them to not sweep it under the carpet anymore.''
By the early 1950s, U.S. bomb makers had developed an even more devastating weapon - the hydrogen bomb.
James Culp, 62, of Virginia Beach, saw two H-bomb tests off Bikini from his ship, the Curtis, in 1952 and 1954. It was ``pretty hair-raising,'' he said.
``You couldn't look directly at the fireball. It was too bright. Looking away from the fireball, with your arms over your eyes, you could see your bones.
``After the initial blast, you could see the shock wave coming across the water. When it hit the ship, you knew it.''
So far Culp has developed no radiation-related illnesses, but he worries that the exposure affected his body in ways that haven't shown up yet.
After attending the 1946 test blasts off Bikini, Robert Atchison's ship, the Sphinx, pulled into a shipyard at Long Beach, Calif., then was sent immediately back to sea after Geiger counters detected high radiation levels aboard.
The levels were brought down by running an acid solution through the ship's piping, Atchison said.
``It's affected me, I know,'' said Atchison, 79, of Portsmouth. ``It's messed my nerves up.
``For months right after the tests, I had red blotches all over my body. Half of my face would be red and half white.
``The Navy never checked us out - never gave us any physicals or anything.''
Jack Madison, 67, of Norfolk, was aboard the Albemarle at the 1946 Bikini tests. He seemed in perfect health until recently, when he lost a kidney to cancer.
He had never smoked. Doctors could find no reason for his illness. He suspects radiation but, he conceded, ``you can't prove anything. . . .
``They think it's a gene that quit functioning.''
Henry Williams served aboard the Wright, one of the ships involved in an underwater test blast off the California coast in 1955.
He was diagnosed with multiple myeloma, cancer of the bone marrow, in 1986 and died in 1993. He was 69.
The bomb test was carried out amid great secrecy, and the Navy pressed Williams and others involved to keep quiet about it. Williams' widow, Amelia Williams of Chesapeake, said he followed those orders almost to the end.
Until his cancer diagnosis in 1986, she said, ``he never told anyone - not even me.''
For more information, contact the National Association of Atomic Veterans, P.O. Box 4424, Salem, Mass. 01970; phone 1-800-784-NAAV. MEMO: For more information, contact the National Assocation of Atomic
Veterans, P.O. Box 4424, Salem, Mass. 01970; phone 1-800-784-NAAV.
Coming Friday: The Cuban missile crisis brings the world to the brink
of nuclear war.
ILLUSTRATION: Color photos
RICHARD L. DUNSTON/Staff
Ronald Buttler's license plate's colors are as vivid as his memory
of the Bikini Atoll blast.
Ronald Butler will tell you that sometimes his vision and voice are
impaired temporarily. Doctors have been unable to discover a cause.
Color photo
As a mushroom cloud rose over the Marshall Islands, target ships'
superstrutures melted and shock waves were felt miles away.
KEYWORDS: ATOM BOMB AFFECTS VETERANS ATOMIC
TESTING by CNB