Wednesday, Oct. 30, 2002 | 11:02 a.m.
Don Whitman was a 21-year-old high school graduate with military training in meteorology and happy to be in the South Pacific in 1952 instead of Korea.
He was unaware that the data he was gathering would play a role in ushering in the thermonuclear age.
"We had little to complain about because our friends from high school were being shot up in the Korean War while we were in the Marshall Islands," the 71-year-old resident of Kansas City, Mo., said.
He and eight other members of the original group of 40 Air Force meteorologists who predicted early nuclear testing conditions gathered Tuesday at the Tuscany Hotel. Their four-day reunion, commemorating the 50th anniversary of the first hydrogen bomb detonation, continues today with a tour of the Nevada Test Site.
Now older, wiser and a bit cynical, the surviving "atomic weathermen" are finding their place in history.
"A funny thing is that for the last 50 years, few people cared about what we did," Whitman said. "Now we are being asked our opinions about Yucca Mountain and whether we knew we were touching the face of history. We were 20-year-old kids. To us it was just a job."
Having made their mark during "Operation Ivy" on Enewetak Atoll in the Marshall Islands, site of the first H-bomb test, they say they have concerns about Yucca Mountain as the nation's nuclear waste repository.
Some take a hardline look at compensation for the "downwinders" of Utah who were exposed to radiation fallout of Nevada's above-ground tests, saying there was little public concern for on-the-job exposure of military personnel.
Whitman eventually paid a price for his service, losing a lung to fallout-related cancer. Fellow weatherman Paul Sulky, 72, of Arizona, lost a kidney to cancer. About half of the crew have died from various causes.
Operation Ivy, the largest atmospheric nuclear bomb detonation, occurred on Oct. 31, 1952 -- Nov. 1 in the Marshall Islands. The thermonuclear device nicknamed "Mike" was triggered as part of a plutonium-fueled test where the equivalent of 10.4 million tons of TNT exploded into a massive fireball.
The detonation was larger than the accumulative total of the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and all other above-ground tests to that date.
"From a ship I watched it and thought, 'Wow, that's one hell of a big bang,' " said Harry Mosher, 77, of Trenton, N.J., a lead forecaster on Operation Ivy. "I hoped that no one would ever again have to see such an explosion."
So successful was the work of the weathermen that a military report credits the data they collected for resulting in the bomb being detonated on the only day during a several week period when the atmospheric conditions were proper.
Nuclear testing in the Pacific Islands led to the search for a continental proving ground, which turned out to be the Nevada Test Site. The move was necessary because Pacific Ocean experiments were expensive and officials felt the area was unsafe as the Korean War and the Cold War intensified.
Nevada was chosen because the federal government already owned the land and because Southern Nevada was close to both Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Northern California.
Harry Blackford, 72, of Charles Town, W.Va., was one of the Ivy weathermen who later went to work at the Nevada Test Site.
"It was such a big waste of money because they would build small towns and place perfectly good cars on the site and blow them up just to watch what would happen," he said.
"The scientific evidence was significant, but I was earning $56 a month, and I would have loved to have owned one of those $2,000 cars they blew up."
Blackford said that much like in the military, work at the Test Site in the early 1950s involved lots of people doing different jobs with no one really knowing the sum purpose. As a result, he and others say they don't blame themselves for the plight of the downwinders.
"I live in Salt Lake City, Utah, and I hear about this subject a lot," said 79-year-old Robert Eskridge, the only officer in the group. "But I had many times more radiation fall on me and not once has the government offered to compensate me for my exposure while I was serving my country."
Mosher agreed, noting he was assigned to test atmospheric fallout that fell on him just after the Ivy detonation.
"They kept handing me meters and taking them away, saying they were defective," Mosher said. "The reading they used for the report was one that showed the fallout was not significant."
As for Yucca Mountain, the concerns ranged from safe storage to security.
"I have great concerns, but that's not to say I don't support Yucca Mountain as the site," Whitman said. "It is a much safer option than having the stuff in piles at sites around the country."
Harold Wainscott, 72, of Overton, Ky., said his concerns focus on the "half-life" of nuclear waste -- which lingers thousands of years -- and the nation's questionable history of disposing of such waste.
"There is a spot on the Enewetak atoll of Runit where nuclear waste was buried in a large crater and covered with a concrete dome," he said. "Today, waves bash over it and are eroding the concrete. What will happen to the environment in a thousand years or less (if it is breached)?"
Eskridge said: "With worldwide terrorism, will Yucca Mountain be safe from someone setting off a nuclear device inside the mountain? What a mess that would create."
Nick Lauletta, a Las Vegas Navy veteran who participated in the unsuccessful search for the body of a pilot killed while conducting atmospheric tests -- the only direct fatality from Ivy -- on Tuesday presented the group a proclamation from Sen. John Ensign, R-Nev., citing their "service, valor and patriotism."
Operation Ivy marked the confirmation of the hydrogen bomb that was designed and developed by physicists Edward Teller and Stanislaw Ulam. The detonation cost the U.S. government $240.9 million, according to the departments of Energy and Defense.
In 1974 the Atomic Energy Commission, which later became part of the Energy Department, approved the first specific and comprehensive radiological protection policy for the Marshall Islands. Enewetak was returned to the Trust Territory Government of the Marshall Islands. The small island is inhabited today.
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