we were recovering animals from the shot island, we dressed in
complete protective clothing including respirators. We :ookcd like
men from Mars, We invaded the shot island to get our animals, and
the plan was that when we came back to our home island with the
animals we would strip off all our clothes and throw therm into a box
on the beach and walk up to the quarters inthe nude. On tke shot
island, we could hardly get a meter reading anywhere. In the meantime, a sheer in the wind had brought the fallout right over our home
island. When we returned to base camp with our animals, we took
off all our clothes and walked in the nude through a hundred times as
much radioactivity as occurred on the shot island! [Laughter]
That's a wonderful story.

TAYLOR: I would like to interject something that you challenged,
Staff. You said a moment ago. you can't hear it. Apropos of the
Dog Shot, fallout was clearly audible. There were little beads of
steel from the tower that condensed,

and one heard this constant

tinkle, tinkle of steel from the tower hitting the aluminum roofs and
then rolling down the gutters and piling up in little piles on the ground.
The thing v.hich I've never understood, which has sonic psychological
significance, I suppose, is that the radiation monitoring teams, pairs
of people with a Zeuss meter, would find one of these little piles and
you just heard from them lots of expressions of various kinds of bad
language about 10 r per hvoir, 40 r per hour, a few r per hour anda
sort of disbelief. The upshot was that everybody kept wandering
around, According toa “Zeuss meter that Herb York“ bad set up in
one of the buildings just to have people file past to see what their
reading was, my own hair was reading 2 r per hour after a shower,
Well, I got worried, along witha number of other people. But sv rehow there was an air of unreality about the whole thing. There was
a big discussion about whether we would have a movie that night or
not, and som2how they,

and no ane seemed to know who "they'' were,

had decided that the movie was all right.
SomehowI've never understood how that could have happened, in
view of all the literature that was available for years before Greenhouse on fallout and on how large areas could be covered with very
intense radiation. No one seemed to want to believe what was happening.

*" Herbert F, Yark, then at the University of California.

oan, “sam te,

FREMONT-SMITH:

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51

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SESSION II

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