Two years ago, on a chilly February morning, I found myself standing on the shore of the Mediterranean Sea. I was wearing a bathing suit, shivering in the cold and feeling like a complete idiot.
It was all Ellen’s fault. A few weeks earlier, before leaving for Spain to research The Day We Lost the H-Bomb, I had had lunch with Ellen Ruppel Shell, a former writing teacher. As we chatted about my upcoming trip, I told her the story of Angier Biddle Duke, the American Ambassador to Spain in 1966. After the United States accidentally dropped four hydrogen bombs near a Spanish village, Duke orchestrated a PR stunt, swimming in the chilly Med to prove that the water wasn’t radioactive.
I mentioned that I was planning to visit the beach where Angie swam. Ellen looked at me and said, “Well, of course you have to swim there, too.” I had to admit she was right. It’s always easier to write about something you’ve experienced firsthand.
Now, here I was on the beach. I had been anxious about the swim, searching for any excuse to get out of it. My translator had mentioned something about a jellyfish invasion of the Mediterranean, which gave me hope. But I had scoped out the beach the previous day and there wasn’t a jellyfish in sight. No people in sight, either. In my few days on the coast I had seen no one in the water and hardly anyone on the beach, just a few pasty Brits and backpackers sprawled on the sand. It was, after all, February.
The next morning I got up at dawn. My plan was to sneak down to the beach without anyone seeing me. The Spanish were used to gringos acting strangely, but a dip in the Med in the middle of winter was surely a bit too far.
The beach was deserted, but I noted with alarm that a tour bus was parked beside the road overlooking the ocean. Unlike Angie Duke, my goal was to attract as little attention as possible. I took off my shirt and shorts, and stood on the beach on my bathing suit, cursing Ellen for putting this idea in my head. Where were those jellyfish when I needed them? I wondered if the tour bus was filling with old folks who now had something interesting to look at.
I took my first step in. The water was clear and cold, the bottom soft and pebbled. I took a few more steps, my feet sinking into the sand. There was a steep drop and I was suddenly up to my waist. A quick count of one, two, three and I ducked underwater. I came back up, shook my hair and tasted the salty water on my face. My job was done.
My 30-second dip in the Med, after all my anxiety, was anticlimactic. Angie’s swim was completely the opposite. --Barbara Moran
From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com Reviewed by Seth Shulman In a historic speech in Prague two weeks ago, President Obama proposed concrete steps to move toward "a world without nuclear weapons," including a test ban, an end to the production of fissile materials and a new Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty with the Russians. This effort to build a safer world is most welcome: The six-decade-long history of nuclear weapons and nuclear power includes a frightening number of fiascoes still shrouded in secrecy. As two new books illustrate, there is much to mine in this atomic tale: stories as big and dramatic as mushroom clouds, events that lend themselves easily to superlatives. When mistakes are made with nuclear reactors and warheads, the consequences are often scary indeed. In her first book, journalist Barbara Moran exhibits dogged research and an eye for detail in reconstructing one such incident. "The Day We Lost the H-Bomb" revisits the 1966 explosion of a U.S. Air Force B-52 bomber carrying four hydrogen bombs over the Spanish village of Palomares, a story the book's subtitle trumpets as "the worst nuclear weapons disaster" ever. Moran, whose background is in television documentary production, takes a cinematic approach, describing everything from the Catalan shrimp fishermen who rescued the U.S. fliers parachuting from the massive plane to the contents of President Lyndon Johnson's breakfast (melon, chipped beef and hot tea) when he got news of the accident at 7:05 a.m. Moran spent years collecting this wealth of detail, interviewing the Air Force officers who survived the crash and exhuming every declassified document she could find on the topic. She even accompanied Air Force officials on a midair refueling (the proximate cause of the accident) so that she could explain that difficult maneuver. Her efforts yield an often riveting tale. Although the conventional explosives in some of the warheads blew up on impact, scattering debris and radiation, the nuclear charges (thankfully) did not detonate. The Air Force quickly recovered three of the four hydrogen bombs on land. But the fourth sank to the bottom of the Mediterranean, setting off a frantic scramble to find it before the Soviets did. To her credit, Moran captures some of the flavor of the Cold War, including the Air Force's determination to keep part of its nuclear arsenal perpetually airborne for fear of a surprise attack. She recounts with some humor how, in the midst of the recovery effort, Johnson went to the White House screening room to watch "Thunderball," the latest James Bond film, in which the evil "Spectre" organization crashes a NATO plane loaded with two nuclear bombs into the ocean, retrieves the bombs underwater and holds them for ransom. What she doesn't do, unfortunately, is sufficiently explain why her minute-by-minute account of the real-life incident matters now, especially given that two top-notch journalists, Flora Lewis and Tad Szulc, wrote books about it within a year after it took place. Moran's use of now-declassified information undoubtedly fills some gaps in the previous reporting, but her book would have been stronger if she had broadened her focus and more explicitly spelled out her tale's lessons for today. Todd Tucker's eye-opening "Atomic America" suffers from the opposite problem: Its focus is too broad. Tucker, a former nuclear engineer with the U.S. Navy's submarine force, initially sets out to tell the astonishing, little-known story of the 1961 explosion of an Army nuclear reactor in rural Idaho. The accident killed all three of the Army operators on site, and Tucker ranks it as (superlatives, again) the deadliest nuclear reactor incident in U.S. history -- a plausible claim, given that the closest contenders are probably the death of a scientist from radiation during the Manhattan Project in 1945 and the 1979 meltdown of Pennsylvania's Three Mile Island reactor, which caused no immediate fatalities. (The Soviet Union's 1986 Chernobyl disaster, of course, was much deadlier.) Tucker is a good explainer, and his background in the field lends authority to his technical descriptions. In the book's central saga, he exposes the Army's cavalier attitude toward nuclear safety in the 1950s as nothing short of criminal. But his sprawling account also chronicles the development of Adm. Hyman Rickover's nuclear Navy and the Air Force's flirtation in the late 1950s with atomic-powered flight, a shocking escapade in which the Air Force designed and built an airplane that ran on power from a 20-ton reactor suspended from its fuselage. Over the life of that project alone, the Air Force spewed 4.6 million curies of radiation -- twice what was released at Three Mile Island -- into the sky over Idaho. Tucker's wide-ranging stories hold loosely together, but the overall effect is dizzying and, as with Moran's book, the message we are supposed to take away is muddled. Tucker is clearly enamored of nuclear power, and in his view, the Navy has handled it responsibly, particularly in comparison with the Army and the Air Force. He may be right about that. But his many examples of the government's often slipshod approach to nuclear safety are likely to leave readers all the more heartened by President Obama's latest nuclear initiatives.
Copyright 2009, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.
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