Nuclear History Mysteries – Sandstone Scientists

It occurred to me recently that the readers of this blog often know more about specific Cold War topics that I could ever learn. That expertise is something deserving both recognition and respect. The result  of this thinking was a planned series of  recurring series of posts dubbed Nuclear History Mysteries in which I post about questions that I've come across in my research for which I do not yet have answers. 

The first of these comes from Operation Sandstone at Enewetak Atoll in the Republic of the Marshall Islands. Taken in April or May of 1948, the photo below shows four Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory scientists/ engineers checking instruments before a nuclear weapons test. The photo was published without a caption in Clarence H. White’s book Operation Sandstone; the Story of Joint Task Force Seven. Washington: Infantry Journal Press, 1949 and released to the news media that same year by the Atomic Energy Commission. As such, is in the public domain.

I am trying to discover the identities of the four men shown in the photo, what island the photo was taken on, and what they are doing? If you know anything about this image, please feel free to leave your comments in the section below. Together, perhaps we can solve one of nuclear history’s minor mysteries.

The Nuclear History Mysteries series will continue to explore the arcane and frequently secret work of American Cold War nuclear weapons testing.

It's Almost Here!

And you can get it at a big discount if you pre-order using the code below!

The news from the University Press of Florida is that my book, The Archaeology of the Cold War, will hit the shelves on July 19th. It's been a long time coming, but it has been well worth the effort and wait.

More great news is that folks at UPF have also provided me with a discount code for family and friends (that's you guys) that will save you almost 60 percent off the book's retail price. Yup, that's right, the book is going to retail for $74.95, but using the code AU616 at the UPF checkout you can buy it from the publisher for just $30. You can't get that deal on Amazon.

Besides presenting information on the development of the North American Cold War built landscape and case studies of investigations conducted at some famous--and some not so famous--historic sites pivotal to the conflict (including Bikini Atoll, the Nevada Test Site, and the Cuban sites of the Soviet Missile Crisis) the book examines the preservation of atomic heritage sites, the phenomenon of atomic tourism, and the role (and plight) of America's atomic veterans in the archaeological study of the Cold War. 

For more information on the book, the great things that reviewers are saying about it, and how to get the discount, go here. But you'd better hurry since the discount code is only valid until June 30, 2016.

Also timed with the book's pending July release is a special column I've written for the UPF Florida Bookshelf blog about some investigations I've done on fallout shelters. That should be posting soon. More news about that and other stuff to come.

My book, The Archaeology of the Cold War, has been accepted for publication by the University Press of Florida after a rigorous review process and I'm delighted to be working with such a great team of professionals. The manuscript is, even now, winding its way through the editorial process. I'll post more as work on it progresses toward a planned 2016 release.

Meanwhile, let's take a trip back to 1955.

Officers from Desert Rock Exercises watch the Teapot MET shot from Frenchman Flat - April 1955. Photo: NNSA/Nevada Field Office.

A Blog Reborn...

Okay, I'm more than a bit embarrassed that it's been 5 years since I've posted anything here. But those years have witnessed a rather profound increase in the global intellectual interest in the archaeology of the Cold War. And I'd like to think I've had at least a little something to do with it. 

I took a bit of an ethnographic turn in 2009 with the publication of “Exploding the Strangelove Myth – Cold War Nuclear Weapons Work and the Testing Times of William Ogle” in The Atomic Bomb and American Society – New Perspectives, G. Piehler and R. Mariner (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press). The book chapter was the first step in a plan to offer new scholarly perspectives on the work of Cold War atomic testing.

In 2010, I had the honor and pleasure of contributing the first paper on the archaeology of the Cold War to the prestigious Archaeological Review from Cambridge issue on Violence and Conflict in the Material Record (Issue 25.1 April). That paper, entitled "Uncovering the Arsenals of Armageddon: The Historical Archaeology of North American Cold War Ballistic Missile Launch Sites," explored the archaeological and material culture aspects of ballistic missile launch sites as potent artefacts of violence and conflict in 20th Century society. Based on fieldwork at twelve former Atlas F missile launch sites located near Roswell, New Mexico, the paper considered the sites as examples of the material manifestations of Cold War paranoia. 

More recently, I've been working on a publication for the University Press of Florida's The American Experience in Archaeological Perspective series, tentatively entitled The Archaeology of the Cold War.  Expected publication is in 2015. I’ll be writing more about that project here in the months to come.

If you'd like to learn more of what I've been up to, check out my Academia.edu web page for copies of the paper and book chapter mentioned above and more.

Keeping a Global Perspective

As an Americanist, I have often found it a challenge to keep a global perspective in my thinking about Cold War archaeology. Admittedly, and obviously, the Cold War affect millions of lives beyond those in North America, but I have often found myself so intently focused on the populations and material culture I know that I neglect to fully consider those with whom I am less familiar.

Here's an example, in my recent studies of the Cold War nuclear weapons testing I had focused primarily on the material culture aspects of American and British testing, while neglecting some very interesting aspects of French nuclear testing. While this was easily remedied by incorporating some additional components into my research, the premise upon which I built my original claims would have been much more robust from the start had I employed a more international perspective from the start.

While I do not admit to this ethnocentric slip gladly, I do so to make the point that it seems to be a natural human tendency to follow our human programming, even in intellectual pursuits. As a child of the Cold War, I was programmed by society to recognize the two superpowers-the United States and the Soviet Union-as the focus of the arms race and as an adult tended to neglect countries like Britain, France, and China in my material culture studies of nuclear weapons work and the countries of the Warsaw Pact from my Cold War studies in general.

While the obvious importance of seeking and keeping a global perspective in studies of Cold War archaeology lies principally in being able to make better claims in scholarly work, a more fundamental benefit might be derived from the coincidence of interests, purposes, and identity that might develop among the members of a global Cold war archaeology community intent on maintaining and enhancing the field.

The shared interests, purposes, and identity that a Cold War archaeology community might possess would ultimately benefit the academic community as a whole.

On Academic Perils

I was so taken with writing last week’s entry on the physical perils of conducting Cold War archaeology that I decided to expand the discussion to consider some of the academic perils of the field.

While the academic risks of engaging in Cold War archaeology are obviously less than the physical perils, they are nonetheless worth contemplating. The first academic peril that comes to mind I will call the risk of not being taken seriously. Every field of art and science has faced this risk sometime in its existence. Charting new territory requires leaving the familiar path and stepping into the unknown. What one expects to find there, or more importantly, what founders might tell others they expect to find there, could be unbelievable enough for them to not take you seriously. Some fields, like quantum physics have struggled for decades to be taken seriously. Perhaps due to the fact that quantum mechanics frequently attempted to articulate physical conditions where classical physics theory had previously failed and where, lacking many yet-to-be-developed instruments, the first quantum physics theories could not be easily tested experimentally. As such, many of the early theoretical discussions were probably more akin to discussions of philosophy and metaphysics than science. Throughout these early and middle decades of the twentieth century, it required strong believers to sustain the intellectual momentum and scientific culture necessary to grow the quantum physics discipline to the point where it would be taken seriously.

Archaeology as a scientific endeavor is a relatively late chapter in the field’s history. Practitioners have worked for almost two centuries to be taken seriously, transcending early enduring representations of the archaeologist as tomb robber to nurture more suitable images of the archaeologist as scientist or historian. This pursuit of legitimacy is perhaps one reason why archaeologists often respond so critically and passionately to the whip-cracking, gun-toting tomb-raiding images of Indiana Jones. They seem to believe, and perhaps correctly, that outsiders may not recognize that what Indiana Jones (a fictional, historical character) does is rarely like the archaeology they know, love and practice.

A failure of the field to achieve legitimacy has some rather dire consequences. Legitimacy is closely tied to the ability to attract funding, to the ability to publish, and the state of being widely known and respected. These three challenges are, in fact, the three principal academic perils of Cold War archaeology I intend to address.

The ability to find funding for research is a core concern of every academician. In recent decades, the ability to fund archaeological research has become more difficult as the physical and biological sciences, as well as business schools, have increasingly monopolized the already tight academic research funding resources. As a result, funding for social science and humanities research has declined over the years, making Cold War archaeology’s entry into an already competitive funding arena less than welcome. Without funding, the field will find it difficult to advance itself as others have in the past, especially as travel and other costs continue to rise in the face of global economic and energy challenges. It may be that the Cold War archaeologist will have to locate and tap alternative and unconventional funding resources.

Assuming funding does not present any insurmountable challenges for a Cold War archaeologist, the perils of publishing still lie ahead. Without the ability to publish, any field runs the risk perishing, or at least not developing a following. The task of finding journals in which to publish and then convincing them to allocate valued space to an emerging field might be difficult. Currently, there are several notable journals that publish archaeological research, including the American Journal of Archaeology, Oxford Journal of Archaeology, European Journal of Archaeology, Antiquity, International Journal of Historical Archaeology and Journal of Archaeological Research. The fledgling Journal of Conflict Archaeology also looks quite promising.

The American Journal of Archaeology and Oxford Journal of Archaeology are journals aimed at classical archaeology and are unlikely to publish Cold War archaeology research. On the other hand, the European Journal of Archaeology and Antiquity, as well as the Journal of Archaeological Research, International Journal of Historical Archaeology and the Journal of Conflict Archaeology all seem to have some potential. In any case, the Cold War archaeology papers that are submitted will need to be exceptional if they hope to compete with a range of excellent papers from other areas of archaeology; papers that are constantly being submitted and more often than not, being rejected behind others more promising.

If Cold War archaeologists are able to conquer the challenges of legitimacy, funding, and publishing, they must still succeed in attracting a strong and consistent following. This is not post hoc, ergo propter hoc. Attracting a following will require researchers to produce research and papers that will cause people to care deeply about the field and its practitioners. It also requires finding ways to draw positive attention to the field and its unconventional aim of uncovering humankind’s recent past. This means not only drawing attention to the work of the field’s practitioners, explaining what do and how they do it, but ultimately why what they find is, or should be, important to them.

The Physical Perils of Cold War Archaeology

Several months back, Sam White, a collector of Civil War artifacts was killed in Chester, Virginia when the seventy-five pound, 140-year old cannon ball he was restoring abruptly exploded, killing him and raining shrapnel in a quarter mile radius around his home. The tragedy led me to consider some of the hazards of military (aka battlefield) archaeology in general, and the physical perils of Cold War archaeology, more specifically.

At first, it seemed implausible that I could identify any true hazards associated with archaeological research on Cold War sites. I mean, aside from a few paper cuts one might get perusing documents in an archive, or the occasional blister from heavy handling a trowel, there appeared to be few things that could befall the Cold War archaeologist. It appeared that the unfortunate artifact collector in Virginia led a far more dangerous life than any Cold War archaeologist.

However, when I actually began to consider some of the hazards that one might run into in the process of conducting an archaeological investigation of someplace like a Cold War nuclear weapons development or testing site, the perils were suddenly very serious and very real.

Obviously, one of the first hazards that come to mind at a nuclear site is the potential for exposure to ionizing radiation. While the nuclear materials used at weapons laboratories were fairly well controlled throughout the Cold War, radioactive contamination is a lurking danger at any of the former nuclear testing site, but perhaps not in the way one might think. The danger is not due to the possibility of finding large chunks of uranium or plutonium, these were too valuable to be left lying around and too easy to detect when lost. The danger at a site like the Nevada Test Site or at certain Pacific Islands is more likely to be due to the probability of stirring up old radioactive fallout during an archaeological excavation. Many of the “dirtiest” fission bombs sucked up tons of dirt or coral in the explosion, mixed it with radioactive isotopes of varying half-lives, and then dropped it as fallout anywhere from seven feet to 7000 miles from ground zero. As a result, digging through fifty-year-old soil anywhere in the US might expose a person to latent fallout to some degree, but digging through fifty-year-old soil at the Nevada Test Site is certain to expose you to far more. I believe that one would need to inhale a considerable amount of fallout dust to pose any real health danger. Nonetheless, it is a potential peril of Cold War archaeological practice.

At other kinds of nuclear weapons sites, like missile silos or strategic bomber bases, the danger from radiation is almost nonexistent, unless the site was somehow inadvertently contaminated. An example of this is an Atlas F missile site near Roswell, New Mexico that was contaminated in the early 1960s as the result of a fire in the silo that destroyed the missile and its warhead. Other than in a situation like that, nuclear warheads were never opened on airfields or in the silos, thus making the chance of radioactive contamination virtually impossible.

ICBM silos, however, are likely to pose other more industrial-type environmental dangers as a result of the various kinds of fuels, cleaning solvents, and once-common Cold War construction materials, like asbestos. Chemical compounds like isonite (isopropyl nitrate), samine, and melanj were used in liquid rocket fuels for both short and long-range missiles by various nations. Chlorinated organic solvents like trichloroethylene, carbon tetrachloride, and trichloroethane were often used for cleaning in missile silos, as well as in other parts of the military-industrial complex. Residues of these compounds remain in the soils surrounding numerous Cold War sites despite ongoing efforts by the departments of Defense and Energy to remediate these legacy wastes.

Other common site dangers range from those created by rodent, insect, or snake infestations in abandoned buildings and underground facilities to the incalculable perils posed by time-weakened walkways and collapsing passageways. Even though the only individuals who seem to currently assume these risks are taggers, scavengers and “urban explorers” who have gained unauthorized access to places like abandoned missile sites for their own ends. However, even professional and avocational archaeologists conducting site surveys could face the physical and environmental risks left by a decaying Cold War infrastructure in the form of open, but hidden, holes and pits filled with water or even chemical wastes.

Even some less obvious perils could be encountered in conducting archaeological research on Cold War sites, include the unearthing of unexploded ordinance or land mines, small arms cartridges, and even high explosives (HE). These dangers vary by site location and by the actual risk level they pose, but all pose threats that are not normally found in other historic or prehistoric sites. Perhaps, not surprisingly, I have little desire to detonate even the smallest small arms cartridge hidden in the dirt using the point of my Marshalltown. Likewise, nothing would seem to take the fun out of a field survey of a former explosives firing site than the discovery of chunks of unexploded HE capable of blowing up my truck if inadvertently detonated. And, as Sam White’s accident proved, the tools of war make no differentiation between combatant and collector and are often deadly for many years.

I assure that the point of this litany of perils is not to scare anyone away from the practice of Cold War archaeology, or an attempt to give the field some “street cred”, but simply to show that the hazards of battlefield archaeology can be as simple and as menacing as a seventy-five pound cannon ball and that it will probably take more than my favorite Marshalltown and a box of Sharpies®, or even a brown felt fedora and a bullwhip, to conquer some of these real Cold War villains.