SESSION II

45

DUNHAM: This was an analogous situation to what was seen in
the Army with malaria. They had little malaria units. Every military group had ateam, but the commanding officers had had no experience with malaria. They didn't see anything and this poor little
malaria unit would cool its heels until] they had a great many cases
of malaria. Then they would be told to scurry around, I think it's
just human nature.
Langham, you seem to be restless there.
to add?

You're the authority on Dog Shot,

Would you have anything

by the way,

because some

of your dogs were there, weren't they?
LANGHAM:

Yes, they were.

Merril's story to me is almost in-

credible.

FREMONT-SMITH: That's like iife! [Laughter]
LANGHAM: Fallout was predicted for the Trinity iest in 1944 by
the bomb phenclogists, Hershfelder and McGee. Stafford Warren
mounted evacuation teams and monitoring teams to cover the potential fallout area. We didn't have to evacuate anybody; we almost did.
The arbitrary limit chosen for evacuation was an infinite life-time
dose of 50 r, One family approached this limit, and there was much
debate as to whether we should evacuate them or not. They weren't
evacuated,
WYCKOFF:

What happened to the cattle?

LANGHAM: Cattle were burned by fallout at Trinity, and we had
experience with fallout at Bikini where there was fallout on ships. I
can't imagine anyone thinking that there wouldn't be fallout involved
with weapons tests. I still to this day want to attribute the 1954
accident to just a little bit of misconception on the part of the meteorologists. [I can't imagine at that time that one would think there
wouldn't be a fallout problem with that device if a populated area was
downwind from the detonation. So they had trouble, and I can't understand why anycue would have expected otherwise.
FREMONT-SMITH: You know what happens on misunderstanding,
It seems to me this is one of the things we have to face. I will give
you a little episode. During World War I we had shell shock, a considerable amount of it. It was so reported, and anybody who studied
the thing at all knew that we were going to have some kind of equivalent

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