Word: bikini
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Dates: during 1946-1946
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Before & After. First scientists to start work at Bikini will be 14 biologists, botanists, oceanographers (and two commercial fishermen, reportedly paid higher wages than the scientists). They sailed from Honolulu last week aboard the U.S.S. Bowditch, to catalogue plant and animal life on & near the atoll. After the explosions, they would make another expedition, to get a before-&-after picture. Years later, they would return to ravished Bikini, to chart the slow, painful process of repopulation...
Long before the Bowditch men finish their work, Seabees will build six 75-ft. steel towers on the little islands around Bikini to support 'batteries of cameras, radio-controlled and sheathed in lead against radiation. A legion of instruments will be exposed on the sand, built into concrete bunkers, or sunk in the lagoon. They will measure radiation, heat, shock and blast. Twenty sunken instruments will measure the waves, which might rise to a height of several hundred feet...
Rats on the Bridge. On that day, the ships in Bikini Lagoon will be manned by "guinea pig" crews: 200 goats, 200 pigs, 4,000 white rats. They will wait their fate in the same positions which a human crew would occupy in battle stations: rats in the turrets, on deck, in engine rooms, gun-tubs and bridges. The goats will be tethered among them. Some of the pigs, whose skin approximates human skin, will be dressed in standard Navy anti-flash suits and smeared with anti-flash lotion. A few will have new and secret protection. There will...
...blast like a hundred hurricanes will whip the still lagoon. A pressure wave will strike across the Pacific, perhaps to be felt by sensitive instruments in San Francisco and Washington. An earth wave will shoot through the sea floor toward distant seismographs. What will happen to the ships in Bikini Lagoon, no one knows...
...reporting by radio. Next, a swarm of 20 launches, manned by raincoated scientists, will scoot like water bugs among the stricken ships. Finally, if all pioneers report that the coast is clear, the Navy's Bureau of Ships, its medical units, and its associated scientists will enter Bikini Lagoon to see what the Model-T bomb has done to the U.S. Navy...