Nuclear programs: primary documents

Van Brandon, a former Army medic, disclosed in February 1982 that he had followed orders to prepare phony records at four atomic tests in 1956 and 1957 at Yucca Flats, Nevada, and had observed falsified documents prepared at a fifth test in November 1955. Brandon stated that his top secret medic group prepared two sets of books: a hot set with the true radiation information and a phony set that showed the soldiers had received less than the maximum permitted level of radiation.

Brandon stated that when he left the Army in 1961 he was warned that if he told anyone of his experiences, consequences would follow. He did not disclose until twenty years later.

A spokesman for the U.S. Defense Nuclear Agency confirmed that a number of people were reviewing twenty-five-year-old records to determine if the charges were accurate. The Defense Nuclear Agency initiated a formal investigation.

Operation Desert Rock was the code name for a series of military exercises conducted in conjunction with atmospheric nuclear tests at the Nevada Proving Grounds between 1951 and 1957. Total DoD participation across six Desert Rock exercises exceeded 68,000 personnel. Participants were placed in observer positions within miles of detonation points, marched toward blast sites following detonations, and given medical examinations intended to document radiation exposure levels.

Participants were classified. They could not disclose their service location, their proximity to detonations, or the nature of what they had observed. This classification extended into their post-service medical histories.

In 1973, a fire at the National Personnel Records Center in St. Louis destroyed approximately 80 percent of Army personnel records for soldiers discharged between 1912 and 1960. For a large portion of atomic veterans, the official record of their service and exposure no longer exists in any government file. The Radiation Exposure Compensation Act of 1990 established a claims process requiring documentation of service that, for many veterans, was destroyed in the fire the government had no role in preventing but had also never adequately backed up.

Uncertainty within the power plant as operators and officials worked to stabilize the core meant that the information provided to government agencies was fragmented, sometimes contradictory, and generally understated the severity of the accident in communications with the public. [...]

At several critical points during the first two days of the accident, NRC officials and the plant operators were working from incomplete and in some cases inaccurate information about the state of the reactor core. This incomplete information was then conveyed to state officials and to the public through official statements that did not reflect the uncertainty of the underlying data. [...]

The NRC was not organized to deal effectively with the accident at Three Mile Island. Its organizational structure, its procedures, and its communications systems were not designed for a sustained emergency of this nature. The fragmented character of the agency's response during the first days contributed directly to the inconsistency and incompleteness of public communications. [...]

The Commission was receiving information that was simultaneously being received, interpreted, and acted upon by multiple NRC officials, plant personnel, and state emergency management staff, without any central coordination mechanism capable of ensuring that the information reaching the public was current, consistent, or complete. [...]

The recommendation that pregnant women and preschool children within five miles evacuate, issued on March 30, was based on incomplete information about a hydrogen bubble in the reactor that NRC officials initially assessed as posing a significant risk of explosion. Subsequent analysis indicated this risk had been significantly overstated. The evacuation recommendation, issued on the basis of an overestimated risk, was never formally rescinded or contextualized for the public after the hydrogen bubble risk was reassessed downward. [...]

The purpose of the Nth Country Experiment was to determine whether a small group of physicists, working without access to classified information, could design a credible nuclear weapon using only information available in the open scientific literature. [...]

Two physicists were selected to begin the experiment in the spring of 1964. [...] The experimenters were provided with laboratory space and access to Livermore's unclassified resources. They were explicitly excluded from any access to classified nuclear weapons design information for the duration of the experiment. [...]

The experiment concluded in the spring of 1967. At the time of termination, the experimenters had produced a weapon design with the potential for a militarily significant explosive yield. The design was based on the principle of plutonium implosion. The experimenters had achieved this result working part-time over approximately three years using only open-source scientific literature. [...]

The conclusion of the experiment is that a nation with nuclear weapons aspirations, a small number of PhD-level physicists, and access to open scientific literature could develop a credible nuclear weapon design without any access to classified information. [...]

Three young PhD physicists, working part-time, succeeded in achieving a workable nuclear weapons design in a period of about three years. The experimenters will brief [agencies and institutions] on the conduct and results of the experiment. [...]

[The briefers] made their presentation in the form of a nightly news report [in the style of the Huntley-Brinkley Report], presenting their findings as if the successful development of a nuclear weapon by a hypothetical Nth Country had just been announced. [REMAINDER OF DOCUMENT REDACTED] [...]

The public must be encouraged to realize that risks [of an unintentional nuclear detonation] cannot be zero and cannot ever be really known. [...]

The possibility of a mistaken or unauthorized detonation, like the risk of unintentional or accidental war, is inherent in the nuclear weapons enterprise. The decades-long effort to reduce this risk through improved weapon safety design has produced significant results, but it cannot produce a guarantee. A weapon that is sufficiently safe to be deployed operationally cannot be made so safe that all environmental insults are without consequence. [...]

The "sealed-pit" nuclear devices that were central to the U.S. stockpile presented specific safety challenges. The concern was that severe environmental insults to such a weapon, including fires, aircraft crashes, or other damage events, could induce a detonation. [...]

The history of U.S. nuclear weapons safety is in part a history of retrofitting safety mechanisms onto weapon designs that were developed primarily for operational performance rather than for accident survivability. [...]

The Air Force resented the implications of safety modifications that could be characterized as "goofproof" mechanisms, viewing such characterizations as a suggestion that Air Force personnel could not be trusted to handle nuclear weapons safely. This institutional resistance created friction in the safety modification process that delayed the implementation of some safety improvements. [...]

[The Department of Energy] restricted distribution of this history. [Portions reclassified Secret.] The history addresses incidents and near-accidents involving specific weapon systems including [REDACTED] and the implications of those events for the safety modification program. [...]