SESSION I! DUNHAM: 81 Wecan live with cranberries and pesticides, but fora while it got blown up all out of proportion, too. It just happens that radiation has created more of these situations than some of the others up until recent years. EISENBUD: I think that this even is one of the really few important historical events in all of history. We woke up ore morning and found that we had bombs that could be exploded if we knew how to use them. It threw our government into such a turmoil that they knew they had to say something but couldn't decide what to say until, when was it, Chuck, that the first real staternent came out? , EISENBUD: It took a year for your government to formuiate a position. This wasn't because they were dismissing it cr that this wasn't important, but it was because they couldn't agree on what their actual position was. UPTON: It seems to me we have here a very real concrete evideuce of disaster. We have fishermen who are sick; fish that have to be thrown away and in turn, a ban against the importation of fish that aren't certified; economic disaster in Japan; newspapers which are eager to play up sensational stories; political groups who want to make capital out of this, There's certainly every element of a problem. The difficulty was assessing the magnitude of the problem soon enough. : EISENBUD: But, you see, there's one element that hasn't been brought out. Thatis that anyone could take that diagram and lay it on a map of Europe, let's say, by putting Bikini near some important Soviet airbase, and point the wind anywhere you choose to, and get 800 r per hour running through friendly nations, This is why I say we have bombs which we are probably no longer in a position to use; imagine the impact of this possibility militarily. UPTON: But at the time, surely the dimensions of that zone were not known very generally, so that the Japanese couldn't really be sure how widespread the cuntamination of the sea might have been, EISENBUD: Ralph Lapp, I think, published the first of these diagrams, and it seems to me it was in the Bulletin of Atomic Sciences a DUNHAM: Well, the first release containing any details came out Nearly a year later, February 15th, or something like that, of 1955.