GAO Cites Dangerously High Radiation at Bikini Atoll : Atomic Tests Periled 17,000, Cranston Charges

Nearly 17,000 of the 42,000 U.S. servicemen and civilians who took part in two atomic tests at Bikini Atoll in 1946 probably were exposed to dangerously high radiation, Sen. Alan Cranston (D-Calif.) charged Wednesday as he released a General Accounting Office report on the tests.

In contrast, a 1984 Pentagon study said participants in the tests--one conducted in the air and the other underwater--were exposed only to low, safe levels of radiation. The Veterans Administration, citing Pentagon findings, has refused to pay the disability claims of 2,500 veterans who blame health problems on the exposure.

At a news conference, Cranston asked President Reagan to order the Pentagon to conduct a new review of the tests. He said that when GAO investigators turned over their report, they told him that about 40%, or almost 17,000, of the participants had suffered higher radiation exposure.

The 16-month study does not try to relate exposure to subsequent illness but concentrates on what it portrays as unreliable monitoring, lack of safety equipment and generally careless procedures by the Navy, Army and other federal agencies conducting the tests.

The report said one of the tests’ weakest elements consisted of participants’ “film badges” that measured only up to 2.0 rems of radiation. A rem is the effect of exposure to 1 roentgen of gamma radiation; a roentgen is the quantity of radiation that will produce ions carrying one electrostatic unit of electricity.

An Arbitrary Choice

In the two-week test period, the military arbitrarily chose 60 rems as the safe limit of exposure, though cumulative radiation was not measured. The permissible exposure now is 5 rems per year; the average person receives only about 0.085 rems of radiation annually from man-made sources such as X-rays and television.

Because the test badges were unable to register more than 2 rems, Defense Nuclear Agency scientists who wrote the Pentagon report counted a fully exposed badge as only that number of rems. GAO investigators, in contrast, contended that the level of exposure likely was much higher.

The GAO report also found that:

--Most test participants wore little, if any, protective clothing.

--Decontamination procedures were not worked out until nearly a week after the second explosion, during which 34,500 Navy and Army personnel aboard more than 200 ships entered the Bikini lagoon.

--There was no measurement of radiation that could have affected personnel who in the following weeks returned to unmanned “target ships” that had been anchored in the lagoon during the explosion.

At the news conference, one veteran of Operation Crossroads, as the tests were known, declared his certainty that exposure to the radiation resulted in physical ailments.

“I’ve got heart disease, diabetes, muscle and joint problems,” said Fred C. Thompson, 60, of suburban Alexandria, Va., who is a vice president of the National Assn. of Radiation Survivors.