LINEAR VS THRESHOLD:
THE GREAT DEBATE
On July 2, 1958 an American-owned, Hiroshima-built yacht sailed
into the test zone near Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands District.
On it were Dr. Earle Reynolds, his wife and children, and a Japanese
citizen born in Hiroshima.
About 12 hours after entering the latitude
and longitude of the zone, the Phoenix was bounded by the U.S. Coast
Guard and ordered to Kwajalein.
Their entry into the zone was inten-
tional, the result of a moral decision to protest the testing by the
United States of nuclear weapons.
The adventure of this sole sailboat
in the waters of the Marshall Islands was representative of a great
worldwide concern by many people at that time with the effects of radio-~
active fallout on man as a result of nuclear testing.
The world's first "superbomb" perhaps better known as a thermonuclear
or H-( Hydrogen) bomb was detonated by the United States on Eugelab Island
of Eniwetok Atoll on October 31, 1952 at 1915 (GCT).
A little over one
year later, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics detonated its first
H-bomb device on December 12, 1953.
The United Kingdom followed with its
first H-bomb explosion on May 15, 1957 (ENW).
The international anxiety
which developed over the effects of these tests and their fallout was due
to the fact, discussed earlier, that thermonuclear explosions in the megaton
range reached heights of 90,000 feet or more.
A-bomb explosions normally
left their fallout in the troposphere which soon returned to earth.
H-bomb
detonations, however had begun to "load" the stratosphere with fallout that
would disperse all over the world and only gradually fall out over a perioé
of months or years.
35
1o14b34