Atomic, Mississippi: 50 Years Later

look at it and just listen I mean this is it's beautiful take care of the trees and all this yeah you know there's just something about this this place it's it's quiet three two one zero time you [Music] Mississippi 1964 it is Freedom Summer in the midst of the civil rights battle it is also the height of the Cold War this government as promised has maintained the closest surveillance of the Soviet military buildup on just two years earlier the nation stood on the brink of nuclear war with the Soviet Union both sides were testing atomic weapons and trying to keep it secret by doing it underground one of the things that the Soviets learned was that treaties can be meaningless there was a Treaty of non-aggression between Stalin and Hitler in 1938 and 39 1941 Hitler basically threw it in the garbage can attacked Russia so any nuclear testing treaties especially ones for sting for some testing underground were suspect but if it's one thing that the Soviet Union believed in and that that's technology and so by allowing them all of the pertinent information making this actually one of the most public nuclear tests ever conducted of both of these um it was it was a form of communication it was a form of communication between technocratic nations and it was something that the Soviet Union could trust that is data scientific data while they observed our tests and indeed they actually replicated these tests in the Soviet Union several years later I believe in 1973 and they were trying to figure out what Russia was doing so those were put there they had boats at sea that would pick up the blast and they could measure they knew the intensity of the blast here so they figured that way they could figure where Russia was doing and what Russia was doing even if it was underground and that was my understanding of what the atomic bombs were therefore that is what led the government here to a remote spot in lung our County typically atomic testing took place in the deserts of Nevada and New Mexico Lamar County would become the first and only site east of the Mississippi for an atomic test the the Atomic Energy Commission went through a whole process to try to find places that were suitable and they sort of through a wide net and the salt will it does have some properties that are useful for this so they were sort of interesting that Mississippi was known Mississippi Louisiana has known really for its salt domes they were just just beginning to develop them pretty extensively so that was sort of the thing that attracted there the federal government's attention to come to Mississippi they chose that because it was a salt dome area and supposedly would stay down below initially my understanding was that they were trying to set off two atomic bombs and two normal explosions that they knew the intensity of project dribble involved two different tests the first in 1964 was called salmon the second blast two years later was called sterling before the salmon tests residents were offered ten dollars to evacuate five dollars for children and a song that didn't have a way to go I had to get somebody to care that's one of over own salt dome Road she didn't she doesn't drive and all her family who lived in Hattiesburg her husband died already passed away they'd carry her somewhere they'd go pick her up she tell you'll have to come get me I'm not going without somebody to come and get me they'd go get her and take her somewhere trying her back salmon involved drilling a half mile deep into the salt dome and exploding a device a third as powerful as the her Oshima bomb on Thursday October 22nd 1964 a nuclear bomb was detonated in Mississippi I tickled it was a day I'll scoop oh yeah we knew what was going on we just didn't know what to expect and the minute I was over it they'd come around they'd talk they had been out of Nevada when they shot him off and they'd come over here and didn't try it over here and see what didn't do we didn't really know what to expect we just knew it was supposed to be a bomb but I had a lot of fun because I got out of school I asked one of the men that was over dal hee about why shit's bad he said well we can't tell how big a bomb is till we blow it up well I had a chemistry professor at the University of Southern Mississippi the head state propped up on his desk and actually got tipped over from the blast effects from the sound of it how was the first of the four events down there as a matter of fact they had no idea how strong the blast would be and many anticipated that in Hattiesburg and actually in Baxter ville that the shock wave from the blast would be no more than if you jumped off a curb boy were they wrong I didn't know nearly as much as most ten twelve year olds do now and to us it was just we're all gonna get together and all our friends our family our kids we played we had kids in the neighborhood and it was just like a a party but then when they said nobody could sit everybody had to stand because it could hurt you then that was a little scary but we really had no clue they didn't tell us very much they really didn't they just said be there because it could shake windows basically is what my dad said they told him and I remember there was a lot of people out there we were kids we were really excited because they grow up sandwiches and cakes in the ground cookies today Dorothy brashears works at Morgan's grocery store in Purvis she is 50 years and a few miles from the first test it was pretty flat out there and you can see it wouldn't start coming the ground rise and it looked like waves coming towards you then when it got under your feet everybody you know got right there you're pretty freaked out but under your feet was just a little Boop but there was a lot of people had cows and things and cows didn't know to stand up and it ruptured their stomachs they did it live not too far from us when she went home she was crying because her whole chimney fell in people's dishes and things fell but nobody really knew what to expect after the last test the federal government monitored the area for a period of years before turning it over to the state since then various state agencies have checked the soil water vegetation and livestock there's whales as drilled and all the different aquifers that are on top of the salt dome and what we do is when we go down there we actually pump the water out of the wells until we get a constant temperature and a constant pH D of the water so we know that that's the actual sample and we take that sample after Clinton and run for about an hour and bring it back to our lab and then test it for treating them and see what components we get out of a lot of the whales and everything we don't get anything you can even detect after the last bomb exploded in 1966 the government called the project a success scientifically and politically also because of such test series that it meant that the 1963 limited test ban treaty which forbade all tests in the atmosphere underwater and in space it ensured that all of that former testing could be placed underground and a certain amount of monitoring could be conducted and that's that's where a lot of this were a lot of the importance of these tests our ally nuclear testing in Mississippi seemed like a huge success but like the test site itself things on the surface were not what they appeared people trusted to government and so they really weren't concerned either nobody was very concerned [Music] what had happened was that they were placing water brine solution at the bottom of the chamber to perform some tests to make sure that the walls of the chamber weren't crumbling that it was solid it was stable and some of this brine flashed over into steam and it burst up through the ground like a like a gusher like a geyser and it irradiated several workers and the water you know came to the surface and ran along the surface into surface pits the workers were successfully decontaminated according to the records but it was during those drøbak operations that radioactive materials came to the surface the problem was tritium a nuclear isotope that is harmless in small quantities but project dribble produced massive amounts that s'what Kaiser thought - in the late 1970s he was invited to bring a group of university students to the test site to study frogs and vertebrates some of our st. Ignace were hot are you actively hot and we found ourselves with it we ran a Geiger counter on and we called in the university authorities and they had us all stay there and we had to all shower and clothes had to be brought to us we had been told there was no radioactivity well there was and it was in the Seine and we contacted it and that's when we complain to the government he lied to us you tired us take students down into this area and I said furthermore we found out there's a whole bunch of vents going down to the chambers that we put Geiger counters over and they were red hot I said we even got our hands back so quick it was like getting twenty x-rays in the head Kaiser's 1979 report caused a near panic it talked about unsafe levels of tritium and frogs with tumors and missing limbs governor cliff finch ordered evacuation of the area sealed it off and created a special task force several biological samples were contaminated can't say with certainty that was intentional but it's certainly looking at the chemicals that were used to contaminate them which was radioactive sodium it certainly seems that the accidental is is sort of that would be harder to believe and what happened what it ended up happening was that certain environmentalists alerted the state government and the governor of Mississippi at the time cliff finch ordered an evacuation of this area so you can imagine it's 3 o'clock in the morning you're dead asleep and police sirens start sounding in the middle of the night and sheriff's are knocking on your door saying it's you've got to get out because of contamination at the Tatum Test Site and again it proved to be false I'd smoke in a few years back when I was researching my book - one of the gentlemen from the Atomic Energy agency's field offices name was Troy Wade he worked at the Nevada Operations Office and he said that with the amount of radiation coming out of these toad liver samples he said the toad would have had to weighed 400 pounds if it was to still be alive which I'd be obvious indication that something is not right at the site Kaiser chaired the state task force and was shocked to find his study was based on faulty data chemists at the University of Mississippi used petri dishes contaminated with radioactive sodium when the Department of Energy did the testing they were cold I couldn't believe I said our people said they were hot as this see for yourself every one of those samples were cold no radioactivity it's they're about embarrassing anyway the ED meek was director of public relations then for us and he and I were on a plane and we flew back to Oxford we were stunned we didn't know what the heck had happened and the chemists head chemist Medicine Airport and I'm not gonna name him but he was crying and found out that it was not correct that all that data they'd been feeding us was not correct and he had no idea why they would not conclude it was sabotage or they wouldn't even mention it but some members of the committee told me personally it looked like the University chemistry department had been sabotage by somebody was it or not I don't know about you but draw your own conclusion there [Music] no here's what happened with why did we get two tumors the tumors were amphibians frogs salamanders okay they were living in water which had tritium tritium is a beta emitter you can drink it because it goes through you but if you live in it it will kill you or calls tumors they admitted the water was full of tritium down there so again that apparently explained the tumors but they never told us about the tritium either they said there wasn't anything down there coincidence or not shortly after the Frog tests came out area residents began complaining of higher cancer rates starting in 1980 the state began looking at cancer rates within 20 miles of the test site every year the tests showed no abnormalities everybody's suspicious nobody believes the government met as far as I can tell the government's never done a whole lot to make anybody to believe them we've always done testing in the area to see if there was risk there's no evidence if there's any threats to public health and we've monitored the site with a Department of Energy grant to assure that there's no public health risk my uncle worked out there a little bit and he went over there after it was over back then they would let you go in companies please nobody cared he went in and he said he found this really warm stream it was just a nice little help and he said a lot of fish and he couched little room there he brought him home and my grandma cooked the morning and he had a big old white cat well when after he ate he fed the moments and everything what was left to the cat a few months later and I can't tell you how long my uncle got cancer in his stomach and the cat got a big cancer on that slip and they both died about this sometimes but he said the water in that area really you have places that handle creosote and firends and dioxins and other chemicals that were used to preserve wood this is timber area and lumber area that would have been handling a lot of creosote creosote is a curse is a carcinogen you know you don't want to get it on you you don't want to adjust it and so there's a lot of chemical pollution around here as well and so trying to discern what causes people to get sick it's it's it's not a cut and dried situation if those radionuclides are kept inside the salt probably the same that's a big eel and they're things that can happen and then again it comes down to to monitor we've got to keep a close eye that's what Johnny green and Ron Forsyth went to find out if it could be contained the Geological Survey started testing in the 1970s with the Department of radiological health monitoring the safety of workers well one report would say the groundwater was moving to the southwest it so many feet three years another one would say it's moving to the northwest it's so many feet for the year another one said to the Northeast or the regional water flow down there is to the southwest and so I started looking at that some of these reports are contrary to what we felt the regional flow would be so that's what kind of hurt my ears what's all this what's going on here there was a lot of water that was generated during their during the blast so there's some water there there's a lot of salt sodium chloride and what else is there only the Lord knows the government buried some of the waste near the surface waste from the chamber explosion chamber and they later admitted that that was hot and they took that off they came in dig it all up took it off and they plugged those pipes that night there was dump trucks came out of there with dirt and they would just cover them with tarps and they would come out there but when they asked them what do you do it we know that a lot of it was taken from the site bike by rail thanks to the Nevada Test Site and disposed of the rest of it is underground Steve Thompson was in high school when the first bomb detonated shortly after graduation his uncle hired him to work on the cleanup crew I had a Timex watch that I throw down in the hole because of the radiation but doing a little old suits I don't see how they protected us a little flight suits they wash them overnight they just run guywho counter over started out every day if it beeped they'd find where it was beeping that if it's properly contained it will always be there for quite a long time but it should not be a major issue as far as surface environments are concerned and the the big question is did they contain that properly is it contained and I think those are some of the the questions that people still sort of talk about [Music] but it's not something necessarily to be feared mentioned radiation and people start thinking of cancer and first one things another like I say you have to get a lot of it as I was explained to me over a fairly short period of time the health that but it was a concern of ours try to make sure that the people in the area were safe from something like that well let's just put it this way I don't think they'll ever do that again here in Mississippi they ran into too many unknowns the Nevada Test Site because it's got a very low population density it's a much better place to test nuclear weapons did the Department of Energy and they I've talked to some representatives from the DOA they freely acknowledged they could have done more to inform residents and keep them in the loop and I'm hoping they learned from their mistakes but I think the people who live around here and the people of the state of Mississippi who remember these tests should learn about what they were really doing and what they were really for and that there's a lot of reason to be proud of it even their sacrifices and their inconvenience this this was important this is very important and the one of the reasons why we haven't had a nuclear war this is one of the this is one of the places where the science that was conducted that a lot of communication between the superpowers conducted is but in many cases there are important historical events that have happened in your own backyard that people haven't paid attention to that people don't pay attention to and again a nuclear test site the only one east of the Mississippi River and relatively unknown this is um you know the this is an important story in a contribution to world international diplomacy on the southern site and for all intensive purposes backwater Mississippi but it's not so much happened here yeah I like this place I really do it's all about the soil [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Landsick Media

Views: 75,891

Keywords: atomic testing, nuclear bomb, baxterville, hattiesburg, misssissippi, trinity test site, nuclear testing, nukes, bomb, atomic bomb, a-bomb, h-bomb, cold war, atomic, explosions, explosion, nuclear weapon, nuclear weapons, atomic weapon, atomic weapons, weapons, missles, underground testing, conspiracy, government, government conspiracy, cancer, poison

Id: k-mOBho7jgI

Length: 25min 17sec (1517 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 10 2018