there is a children’s playground at the nuclear museum
Docent #1: I was trained as a geologist and a diver. We dived at Bikini and Eniwetok. Mostly Eniwetok. The trouble at Bikini is that there were a lot of shots on the same site, so it was hard to isolate the effects. At Eniwetok there were a lot of different sites. We scuba dived and had submersibles, for the deeper sites. We looked at the damage to the coral. This was 20 years later.
Castle Bravo was at Bikini, Mike was the big shot at Eniwetok. There was another shot that was in a tank, a water tank. That let us study the effects for the more modern type of weapons. Like the bunker busters, yes… You have a technical background? (No, but my father was an engineer and I think my grandfather was involved in the British atomic tests.) Yes, many thousands of us were involved.
Ironically I ended up helping to create the specifications we sent to the DOE for new designs. Because I understood the effects, as a geologist, I could advise on changes. Improvements. (More efficient? More destructive?) Both.
Of course I worry they’re going to be used. Did you see the Doomsday Clock? (Yes, and I check it frequently.) Then you know we’re at 90 seconds to midnight. It’s the most dangerous time we’ve ever seen, and people don’t realize. The last of the effective treaties with Russia runs out next month. In the eighties, in the old cold war, people knew what we were up against. Now we’re in a new cold war, and people don’t even know how much danger we are in. I wish we had leaders who understood it.
Docent #2: Back when we had an Atomic Energy Commission, it paid for me to go to graduate school. Nuclear engineering. I worked at Sandia. I have a measly master’s and I worked in safety, an I would write these reports and the scientists would say, “I have a DOCTORATE.” They do say PhD stands for piled higher and deeper…
I was in San Francisco in the seventies and eighties. I loved it. Is it still like that? Are you all right? I was working with colleagues at Lawrence Livermore, and I would get over to the city every chance I got.
I had some other Australians in here this week! You’re from Australia, you know how common uranium is, especially in your country, but you don’t even use it for energy. You sell it all to China. (Yeah, like that’s not gonna come back to bite us.) Yeah, you get the money, but at what cost?
I think we should get rid of them all. Everyone who works on them feels that way. But the trouble is that if we get rid of them, the other guy still has them. There are nine countries that have them, and some of them, the leaders are pretty… Unreliable. (What can we do?) Don’t vote for the unreliable ones. You’re both younger than me. It’s in your hands now.
