With the plutonium-contamination test out of the way, the Armed Forces Special Weapons Project began moving forward with the rest of the 1957 open-air nuclear-test series. It was a boon to the Las Vegas economy, supplying millions of dollars in resources and in jobs. Each test was reported to cost about three million dollars—approximately seventy-six million in 2011 dollars—although it is impossible to learn what that figure did or did not include.
Nearly seven thousand civilians were badged to work at the test site during Operation Plumbbob. Another fourteen to eighteen thousand employees of the Department of Defense also participated; official figures vary. But despite all the money being pumped into Las Vegas, the debate over fallout threatened to cancel the tests. Just two weeks before Project 57 contaminated 895 acres adjacent to Groom Lake with plutonium, Nobel Prize winner Linus Pauling made a statement that spooked the public and threatened the tests. Pauling said that as a result of nuclear tests, 1 percent of children born the following year would have serious birth defects. The Atomic Energy Commission responded by positioning their own doctors’ opinions prominently in the news. Dr. C. W. Shilling, deputy director of biology and medicine for the Atomic Energy Commission, ridiculed Linus Pauling, saying that “excessively hot baths can be as damaging to the human sex glands as radioactive fallout in the amount received in the last five years from the testing of atomic weapons.” In hindsight, this is astonishingly erroneous, but at the time it was what Americans were willing to believe.
Almost every newspaper in the country carried stories about the debate, often presenting diametrically opposed views on the subject in columns side by side. “Children are smaller on island sprinkled with nuclear fallout,” read the Santa Fe New Mexican; “Study Finds Kids Born to Marshall Islanders Are Perfectly Normal,” headlined another; “2000 Scientists Ask President to Ban Bomb Tests,” the Los Angeles Mirror declared. Editorials, such as the one published on June 7 in the Los Angeles Times, suggested that a recent influx of seagull and pelican deaths along the California coast was proof that the biblical End of Times was at hand.
All across Europe there were protests. Japan tried to get the tests canceled. When it became clear that the tests would go forward, one hundred enraged Japanese students protested at the U.S. embassy in Tokyo. When things turned violent, heavy police reinforcements were called in. Prime minister of India Jawaharlal Nehru called the tests a “menace” and, in a personal appeal to President Eisenhower, proclaimed that unless all nuclear tests were stopped, the Earth would be hurled into a “pit of disaster.” Soviet scientist Professor Federov publicly accused the United States of developing a weapon that was meant to cause worldwide drought and flood. To counter the campaign aimed at putting an end to nuclear testing, the Atomic Energy Commission kept the propaganda rolling out. Colorful characters such as Willard Frank Libby, one of the Agency’s leading scientists and known as Wild Bill of the Atom Bomb, insisted that “science is like an art. You have to work at it or you will go stale. Testing is a small risk.” In the end the weaponeers won. When it was finally announced that the Plumbbob series had received presidential approval, the press release described the twenty-four nuclear tests (the other six were called safety tests) as “low yield tests,” promising none would be more than “30 kilotons.” The six “safety tests” were generally excluded from mention. The magnitude of the megaton bombs set off in the Pacific had fundamentally warped the notion of atomic destruction. The Hiroshima bomb, which killed seventy thousand people instantly and another thirty to fifty thousand by radiation poisoning over the next few days, was less than half the size of what the U.S. government was now calling “low yield.”