the Ecology of Exterminism 151

Nuclear War, Radioactive Rats, and the Ecology of Exterminism

Brian Lindseth1

The Rat Project and the Problem of Survival

You would swear that that the whole world was on fire. It was really some- thing Iʼll never forget. Unnamed sailor commenting on the detonation of Ivy Mike, quoted in Hansen (1988), 59

When in November of 1951 scientists of the Atomic Energy Commissionʼs Applied Fisheries Laboratory surveyed the effects of the worldʼs first ther- monuclear explosion, they were overwhelmed with the level of destruction wrought by the explosion.2 The destructive power of the test, named Ivy Mike, was registered as 10.4 megatons, or 10.4 million tons of TNT—rough- ly eight hundred times larger than the explosion in Hiroshima.3 It was enough force to destroy completely the island on which the detonation took place. Observers positioned 35 miles away at sea first experienced the light and the heat from the blast, and then the “tremendous fireball appear[ed] on the horizon like the sun when half risen.” By the time the shock wave hit a couple minutes later, a “sharp report” was followed by “an extended, broken, rumbling sound.” At this time, the mushroom cloud was 100,000 feet high. Within thirty minutes it would span 60 miles.4 When the Applied Fisheries Laboratory scientists visited the island of Engebi located just a few miles from the blast, the island appeared to be

1 I am most grateful for the ongoing support and comments of Yeesheen Yang and Charlie Thorpe as well as the feedback of Ryan Hediger, Katie Kenny, Liz Petrick, Jon Stern, and two anonymous reviewers on earlier drafts. 2 Occasionally here I refer to Ivy Mike as a weapon test, even though the device was too large to be deployable as a bomb, partly for ease of reference and partly as it was a test of the principles that would result in the development of a deployable weapon. 3 Richard Rhodes, Dark Sun (New York: Simon & Schuster 1996), 510. 4 Witness account of Major A.S. Knauf, quoted in Barton Hacker, Elements of Controversy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 87. See also Chuck Hansen, U.S. Nuclear Weapons (New York: Orion Books, 1988), 57–8. 152 Brian Lindseth wiped clean of all life. In their official report of their survey, the team noted that they found no rats that had survived and that “the sole bird found on Engebi post shot had been blown to pieces by the shock wave.”5 In his history of the Applied Fisheries Laboratory scientists, team member Neil Hines noted that the island of Bogombogo, which was farther from the test site than Engebi, “had been stripped of vegetation by the force and heat of the blast. Palm trees had been burned down to the roots. All animal life, so far as members of the team could tell, had been snuffed out.”6 While the scientists found no rats when they surveyed Engebi in the days following the blast, they were bewildered to discover on later trips to the island that a number of rats had somehow survived the devastation wrought by Ivy Mike. In fact by 1954, the scientists saw that enough rats had survived to repopulate sections of the island. The ability of these Polynesian rats to live through the test represented an ongoing puzzle to these ecologists. The conditions to which their habitat had been subjected were unprecedented. The blast alone would have been devastating enough. In addition to the blast, the rats survived a devastating level of heat and radiation after the detonation and a surge of radioactive water that was blown over the island.7 How could they possibly have survived? Perhaps, these scientists mused, the original rat population had been wiped out, and rats from some neighboring island swam to Engebi once the post blast levels of radioactivity had died down. But this could not have been the case. The strength of the ocean currents and the distance between the islands would have been too great. Ecologists concluded that some rats must have survived the Ivy Mike test on Engebi.8 Opinions differed as to how the rats survived. Team scientist Frank Lowman believed that some of these rats must have been separated from the blast by structures built as a part of the testing program. Some of them must have been in portions of bunkers and in cable tunnels that were far enough underground to afford protection. Later, William Jackson, a biolo- gist who had done extensive field research in the Pacific islands, argued instead that the Polynesian rats were not alone on Engebi at the time of the blast. The more common roof rat (rattus rattus) had joined the native Polynesian rat (rattus exulans) on the island by the time of the Ivy Mike

5 Radiobiological Studies at Eniwetok Atoll Before and Following the Mike Shot of November 1952 testing Program, UFL-33 (United States Atomic Energy Commission, 1953), 62. 6 Neil O. Hines, Proving Ground (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1963), 143. 7 Hines, Proving Ground. William Jackson, “Survival of Rats at Eniwetok Atoll,” Pacific Science, Vol. XXIII, July (1969): 265–275. 8 Jackson, “Survival of Rats.” Hines, Proving Ground.