ENCLOSURE TIT
UNITED STATES
ATOMIC ENERGY COMMISSION
WASHINGTON, D,C,
February 3,
1955
Admiral Alfred C, Richmond
Commandant
U.S, Coast Guard
Washington, D.C,
Dear Admiral Richmond:
The purpose of this letter is to request that a suitable
Coast Guard vessel be made available to the U.S, Atomic Energy
Commission for the purpose of accomplishing the special mission
hereinafter described,
The Commission is in the possession of
scientific data which strongly suggest that radioactive debris
from Operation CASTLE, originally trapped in the North Equatorial
Current, are now moving via the Kuroshio Current toward the islands of Japan and Formosa,
It is vitally important to the Commission's scientific program and to the future use of the Pacific
Froving Grounds to assess the possibility described above and
to determine with greater precision the fate of radioactive contamination from the detonation of nuclear and thermonuclear devices in the Pacific,
We believe also that should levels of radiation significantly above natural background be detected in
Formosan and Japanese waters, important political consequences
might ensue regardless of the fact that the activity is not considered to be harmful to heaith,
Discussions with the Office of Naval Research and the
Office of the Chief of Naval Operations (Op 36), and who we un-
derstood were in contact with Captain C.G. Bowman, Commanding
officer, Floating Division, and Lieut, D.A, Webb, Testing and
Developmen’ Division, U.S, Coast Guard, led us to believe that
(1) the Navy could not provide a suitable vessel due to prior
commitments, (2) a suitable Ccast Gvard vessel, an AVP, the
USS Matagorda, was available to the AEC at Pearl Harbor, and (3)
the procedure to obtain the vessel was a formal request to the
Chief of Naval Operations, Hence, a letter to the Chief of
Naval Operations, a copy of which is enclosed, (with attachments),
was prepared and dispatched,
We now understand that the Chief
of Naval Operations prefers that the AEC make direct application
to the Commandant of the Coast Guard - which is the purpose of
this letter.
It is planned that the proposed survey be a joint undertaking by the AEC and the Office of Naval Research,
We under-
stand that by letter dated January 28, 1955 the Office of Neval
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Enclosure IIT