testing nuclear weapons (the good old days)

Factual Questions
1

One thing I’ve always wondered when I saw a news reel of an a-bomb test… you always see the men on the ships, watching the explosion over the pacific.

  1. How far back would the ship have to be to be safe?

  2. Did the bomb ever generate a sunami-like wave that put ships in the area in danger?

  3. Did any of the sailors go blind as a result of being so close? (i know some wore glasses, but I don’t know if all did, or if the glasses stopped the person from blindness.

  4. was there any statistics kept on how many of the sailors died as a result of exposure to radiation?

I remember seeing one in particular where the shot was from above (a plane obviously) and the bomb’s mushroom cloud rolled out and covered the ships on the water below. That means the ships were fairly close to the explosion. And I would assume the bomb created one hell of a wave, right?

2

Concerning your last observation, unmanned decommisioned and captured ships were used as targets.

3

I think ships that close were empty junkers.

4

I imagine most of the stock footage you’ve seen is from the Operation Crossroads shots. They were the first post-war nuclear tests which used a fleet of captured axis and surplus US Navy ships as a target (so the ships actually in the mushroom cloud were unmanned, although there were some test animals who mostly died).

Reading the wiki article might answer some of your questions-- the tests were in some part meant to answer some of the same questions about how close you could safely be to a nuclear explosion, but the test itself ended up being a bit of an environmental disaster in and of itself. I don’t think anyone was blinded, but the islands where the tests were conducted were badly contaminated and a lot of the personnel conducting the test were exposed to varying levels of radiation, the long term health-effects of which are still debated. One study discussed in the wiki article says it shaved about three months off the lives of the participants.

Incidentally, the test site is now an awesome scuba diving site with all the historic warships that were sunk there, but you still have to pack in all your food and water because of lingering radiation issues (and is otherwise quite difficult to get to). I had a neighbor that dived the atoll back in the 80’s and had an awesome slideshow.

5

Here’s a fairly recent article about UK test survivors and their claim for compensation. The sample cases at the end show how little was understood about the radiation risk at the time.
One of them says he watched a test from 5 miles away, without glasses, he just put his hands over his eyes (and saw the bones, it was so bright).

6

At the top of this otherwise-not-very-useful page are 4 links to various sites on human exposure testing, “atomic veterans,” and Operation Crossroads.

7

Not to hijack the discussion, but if you haven’t seen it, do:

A Time-Lapse Map of Every Nuclear Explosion Since 1945 - by Isao Hashimoto