ATOMIC DOCTORS

After his father’s death, Nolan Jr., professor of sociology at Williams College, received a box of revealing material from his grandfather James F. Nolan, chief medical officer at Los Alamos. It intrigued him enough to produce this haunting book, which describes his grandfather’s job, which began with delivering medical care but finished by dealing with the bomb’s radiation dangers. As the July 1945 date of the first test approached, Nolan and medical colleagues warned Gen. Leslie Groves, the project’s commander, that fallout might require evacuation of nearby areas of New Mexico. Groves downplayed the possibility, but it turned out that civilians received levels of radiation higher than considered “safe,” levels that, “less than twenty years later, would be regarded as eight hundred times higher than the accepted standard.” The news was suppressed and victims kept unaware for fear of litigation. Throughout, the author makes it clear that the military approached radiation as a public relations problem, and the doctors who knew better treaded lightly for fear of upsetting their superiors. "When accidents did occur,” writes the author, “the doctors were used to procure scientific data and then became complicit in hiding evidence, motivated, once again, out of fear of litigation.” Nolan accompanied fact-finding commissions to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and though more than a month had passed since the explosions, they encountered horrendous suffering and radioactivity. Their reports did not conceal these facts, but Groves paid no attention, assuring Congress that residual radiation was absent and that the bombs themselves caused few radiation casualties. Nolan returned to medical practice but not before joining other medical experts in the first postwar tests, Operations Crossroads and Sandstone, held in the South Pacific, where, despite warnings, military leaders exposed themselves, their men, and local islanders to deadly levels of radiation. The author delivers a solid narrative of America’s painful introduction to atomic radiation.

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