No Place to Hide is a 1948 book by American writer David J. Bradley published by Little, Brown and Company. The book is a Harvard Medical School graduate's autobiographical tale of his work in the Radiological Safety Section in the Pacific in the aftermath of the Bikini atomic bomb tests, Operation Crossroads.
Background In the summer of 1946, 42,000 military personnel and military scientists assembled on the Bikini Atoll, a coral reef in the Marshall Islands of the Pacific – some 2,500 miles southwest of Hawaii – for Operation Crossroads, a joint effort led by the United States Navy (USN); the United States Marine Corps (USMC); the United States Army (USA); the United States Air Force (USAF); and the United States Coast Guard (USCG) to carry out the first publicized testing of the U.S. Military’s atomic arsenal. [1] The impetus for the tests originated from an inquiry made by future chairman of the Atomic Energy Council, Lewis Strauss who penned to Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal in a memorandum dated 16 August 1945 the need to test the navy fleet’s protection against atomic blasts out of fear of losing to obsolescence. [1] Two tests were conducted–Abel and Baker–in 1946. Both tests consisted of the detonation of two plutonium-infused, Fat Man-style atomic bombs each with a yield of 23 kilotons of TNT (96 TJ). A test sample of 95 ships were stationed in the Bikini Lagoon. Over 175 reporters were stationed to bear witness to the testing, broadcasting for millions around the world alongside many invited guests that included senators, congressmen, a member of Truman’s cabinet, and invitees from the United Nations. [1] A third test – Charlie – was scheduled for January 1947, but it was scrapped after radiation from the first two tests corrupted the sample ships left as controls in the experiment. Since the army only had seven atomic weapons in its arsenal at the time, and because manpower diverted to the cleanup of the ships in the first two experiments caused unexpected delays, it would be nine years before the military understood the effects of nuclear depth charges detonated deep beneath the ocean in Operation Wigwam. [1]
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