LJ DEAL, written in hand
The report prints no author. L. Joe Deal was a career health and safety officer of the Commission's Division of Biology and Medicine, and the archives stamp below files this copy in his own papers.
Report on Project Gabriel
1954-07 · 44 source pages
The 44-page Gabriel report includes separately authored procedures. A separate five-page status report can be read here.
Source scans are unavailable here. Publisher annotations remain available below.
Publisher annotations
Commentary by The Declassified Collection, separate from the original source.
Source PDF page 1 · 2 notes
Copy control and restricted data
The head block numbers this as copy 8 of 20 in Series A. At the foot is the restricted-data legend of the Atomic Energy Act of 1946, struck through with a cross, and a 1989 stamp cancelling the classification.
Source PDF page 2 · 2 notes
Nicholas M. Smith, Jr.
Smith was a physicist at Oak Ridge National Laboratory who ran Gabriel as a one-man study from 1949. Printed page 1 credits him with the finding that strontium-90 sets the limit on the long-range hazard.
AUREOLE
AUREOLE was the name later given to the short-range half of Gabriel, contracted to the RAND Corporation in 1952. The report referred to here is RAND's own and is not among the leaves reproduced in this volume.
Source PDF page 3 · 2 notes
Where the name Sunshine enters
A RAND conference in the summer of 1953 recommended a worldwide survey of strontium-90. The General Advisory Committee extended Gabriel under the name Sunshine that August.
Secrecy and foreign sampling
The paragraph lists human bones among materials gathered from some twenty countries, then records that keeping the survey secret restricted which foreign samples could be obtained.
Source PDF page 4 · 2 notes
Infant bodies and the milk supply
The page describes a designed comparison: strontium-90 measured in the bodies of babies from a large city, set against the strontium-90 in that city's milk supply.
Airburst, tower shot, surface shot
Printed page 3 fixes the report's three burst classes by how much of the fireball touches the ground: none, less than half, half or more. Every fallout percentage over the next several pages rests on that division.
Source PDF page 5 · 2 notes
The two surface shots on record
The report has surface-burst data from two events only: Jangle Sugar, 1.2 kilotons in Nevada on 19 November 1951, and the Pacific test of 1 March 1954.
The rain-bearing level
The report treats roughly 20,000 feet in summer as the ceiling of the layer in which rain forms. Whether a cloud rises above it, which follows from yield, decides how much debris rain can bring down.
Source PDF page 6 · 2 notes
Fractionation
Fractionation means the fission products no longer appear in the proportions in which they were made. Strontium-89, strontium-90 and barium-140 form through noble-gas precursors that condense late.
The 300-millibar level
Meteorologists track winds on surfaces of constant air pressure rather than at fixed heights. The 300-millibar surface lies near 30,000 feet, taken here as the cloud's altitude.
Source PDF page 7 · 2 notes
Libby and Kulp
The two university laboratories doing Sunshine assays: Willard Libby's at the University of Chicago's Institute for Nuclear Studies, and J. Laurence Kulp's at Columbia.
The June 1953 and April 1954 peaks
Both spikes in rainfall activity follow test series. Upshot-Knothole ran at the Nevada Proving Grounds from 17 March to 4 June 1953; Operation Castle opened at Bikini on 1 March 1954.
Source PDF page 8 · 2 notes
dpm and dpm per square foot
The report's unit of activity is disintegrations per minute, the number of atoms decaying each minute in a sample. Per square foot it becomes a deposit density.
The New York laboratory
The Health and Safety Laboratory of the Commission's New York Operations Office, formed in 1947 under Merril Eisenbud. It ran the fallout collection network and the air sampling.
Source PDF page 9 · 2 notes
The coral atoll shot of 1 March 1954
This is Castle Bravo at Bikini, the largest American detonation ever fired. The island a hundred miles east in the fallout path is Rongelap, whose people were evacuated on 3 March, two days after the shot.
Five American test series since 1951
Counted from October 1951 the five are Buster-Jangle, Tumbler-Snapper, Ivy, Upshot-Knothole and Castle. Stations outside the United States were added only from November 1953.
Source PDF page 10 · 2 notes
The Ankara soil sample
A single sample of Turkish soil sits among the American figures. It is one instance of the foreign collection described on printed page 2.
John H. Harley
Harley was a chemist at the New York Operations Office Health and Safety Laboratory, which he later directed. The soil and pasture analyses cited on printed page 9 are his.
Source PDF page 11 · 2 notes
G. V. Alexander, UCLA
George V. Alexander worked in the UCLA Atomic Energy Project, a Commission-funded laboratory in the School of Medicine. His survey covered the water of fifty American cities.
Ammonium acetate extraction
Leaching soil with ammonium acetate removes the exchangeable fraction, the part a plant root can reach. The report treats that fraction as available strontium-90.
Source PDF page 12 · 2 notes
R. G. Menzel
Ronald G. Menzel was a soil scientist with the Department of Agriculture at Beltsville, Maryland. His crop-uptake experiments supply most of the plant data on printed pages 11 to 13.
Strontium and calcium
The chemical premise of the whole programme is set down on printed page 11: a plant root cannot tell strontium from calcium. That is why strontium-90 travels the calcium route and ends in bone.
Source PDF page 13 · 2 notes
The Sunshine Unit
One Sunshine Unit is a million-millionth of a curie of strontium-90 per gram of calcium, about a thousandth of the burden then held permissible for an adult skeleton.
The American and Russian series
The parenthesis dates the samples. The American series was Upshot-Knothole, which ended on 4 June 1953; the Soviet series opened at Semipalatinsk on 12 August 1953.
Source PDF page 14 · 2 notes
C. L. Comar
Cyril L. Comar worked on strontium and calcium metabolism at Oak Ridge, becoming chief of biomedical research at the Oak Ridge Institute of Nuclear Studies in 1954.
Milk as the calcium route
Printed page 13 names milk as the largest source of calcium in the American diet, and so the principal path by which strontium-90 would reach people.
Source PDF page 15 · 2 notes
The human material
Printed page 14 sets out what was measured in people: stillborn infants in Chicago, bone from twenty-six individuals aged fetus to seventy-five, and cadavers held since 1914.
The accidental exposure of 1954
The fallout from Castle Bravo on 1 March 1954. The natives are Marshall Islanders from Rongelap, Ailinginae and Utirik; the Americans, servicemen at the Rongerik weather station.
Source PDF page 16 · 2 notes
Austin M. Brues
Brues directed the medical division of Argonne National Laboratory from 1950. The estimate here converts human radium injury into a strontium-90 figure by a factor of ten.
MsTh and RaTh
Mesothorium and radiothorium, the older names for radium-228 and thorium-228. Both went into luminous paint alongside radium-226, so the dial workers carried thorium-series activity too.
Source PDF page 17 · 2 notes
University of Utah chronic toxicity work
Utah's Radiobiology Laboratory injected beagles with radium, mesothorium and plutonium under AEC contract from the early 1950s. MsTh is mesothorium, radium-228.
Probable error stated as a factor
Error here is a multiplier, not a plus-or-minus. A probable error of a factor of two means an even chance the true value lies between half the figure and twice it. Every number that follows carries one.
Source PDF page 18 · 2 notes
The soil-plant-milk-bone chain
Each numbered assumption is a strontium-to-calcium ratio at one step of the chain: soil to plant, feed to milk, food to skeleton. Multiplied together they give what reaches a child's bone from a unit of fallout.
The t^-1.2 decay law
The t^-1.2 rule is the Way-Wigner approximation for mixed fission-product decay, published in 1948. The report steepens it to t^-1.4 to allow for rain and wind carrying activity off the ground.
Source PDF page 19 · 2 notes
Square feet per pound of vegetation
The parameter is square feet of fallout caught per pound of vegetation. Four is chosen from four disagreeing measurements, and means ten percent retention on a pasture.
Libby and Harley
Libby assayed strontium at the University of Chicago's Institute for Nuclear Studies; Harley was a chemist at the AEC's Health and Safety Laboratory in New York.
Source PDF page 20 · 2 notes
Ba-140 and I-131
Barium-140, half-life about thirteen days, follows calcium into bone as strontium does. Iodine-131, half-life about eight days, collects in the thyroid. That is why each isotope is carried to a different organ.
The drinking-water assumptions
Only two percent of the activity is assumed to stay dissolved, the rest held back by watershed soil. That step carries a probable error of a factor of four, the largest stated on the leaf.
Source PDF page 21 · 2 notes
Retention by route
The same isotope is given two retention figures, one for what is swallowed and one for what is breathed. Strontium and barium hold at ten and five percent; iodine drops from thirty percent to twenty.
C. Final Word
The heading closes the report's own calculations by listing what they leave out: burst type and season, the economic and social disorder around a fallout, and judgments the text itself calls philosophical.
Source PDF page 22 · 2 notes
Table 5, how it is scaled
Every figure is a total dose in rads from one assumed unit of fallout: a kiloton of fission debris on a square mile. Columns divide each isotope by route, soil, leaf, water and air; rows by the delay before fallout.
The probable-error row
The bottom row is not a dose. It gives each column's probable error as a multiplier, so a column marked seven means an even chance the true value lies within a sevenfold band either way.
Source PDF page 32 · 2 notes
New York Operations Office, AEC
Section III is the Commission's own laboratory: the Health and Safety Laboratory of the AEC's New York Operations Office, founded in 1947 under Merril Eisenbud.
Figure 1
The report's only photograph, printed with a bare label and no credit line. It shows a bank of counting tubes in a shield, and belongs with the instrumentation described on the preceding leaves.
Source PDF page 33 · 2 notes
Separating strontium from calcium
Strontium and calcium behave alike, so the chemistry turns on solubility: in strong nitric acid strontium nitrate drops out while calcium stays dissolved.
Tracerlab and H. Reeve Angel
Tracerlab, Inc. of Boston, founded in 1946, was among the first commercial makers of counting instruments. The procedure names it and its filter supplier.
Source PDF page 34 · 2 notes
The fusion and silica steps
Soil is fused with sodium carbonate and the silica then driven off with hydrofluoric acid, to release strontium locked in mineral grains whatever form the fallout took.
Recovery, and the food procedure
The soil method is stated to recover about three quarters of the strontium present. Vegetation and foods rejoin the same route after ashing, so bone, soil, plants and food are handled as one analytical family.
Source PDF page 35 · 2 notes
Sr-90 measured through Y-90
Strontium-90 decays to yttrium-90, half-life sixty-four hours and a far harder beta. Separating the ingrown yttrium and watching it fade distinguishes Sr-90 from Sr-89.
Kulp, and page 30
J. Laurence Kulp ran the Sunshine assays at Columbia University's Lamont Geological Observatory. The page cited here falls inside the university-written part of Appendix A, which this edition does not reproduce.
Source PDF page 36 · 2 notes
IV. Department of Agriculture
Section III ends in the first paragraph and Section IV opens below it with no break in the page. The Department of Agriculture is the fourth laboratory in the appendix and the third government one.
Exchangeable calcium
Exchangeable calcium is the fraction held on soil particles and available to roots, not the total calcium in the ground. It is the denominator of the soil strontium-to-calcium ratio the whole model runs on.
Source PDF page 37 · 2 notes
Reading the Appendix B columns
I.V. is intravenous, I.P. intraperitoneal. Sr/Ca ratio retained is the discrimination factor: below one, the animal keeps proportionally less strontium than calcium.
The Reference column
The Reference column runs one to thirteen on its own numbering and does not key to the References list at the end of the report. The appendix prints no key to it.
Source PDF page 38 · 2 notes
A table leaf with no head
This leaf carries neither title nor column headings. Appendix B runs on with the ruling alone, and only the bracketed abbreviation marks it as a continuation.
Kidman, Tutt and Vaughan
The rabbit series is reference thirty-five in the report's list. Janet Vaughan, a haematologist, directed the Medical Research Council's unit on bone-seeking isotopes in Britain, the parallel effort to this one.
Source PDF page 39 · 2 notes
The Sunshine Unit
One Sunshine Unit is a picocurie of strontium-90 for every gram of calcium. Measuring against calcium rather than against tissue weight is what lets a cheese and a skeleton stand in the same column.
The foot of the table
The last four rows leave animal products behind and record assays of human material: stillborn infants at Chicago, in Utah and at Vellore in southern India, and adult limb bones from Massachusetts.
Source PDF page 40 · 2 notes
Reading the Appendix D columns
The fifth column is the activity given, in microcuries per gram; the sixth converts it to an estimated daily dose to the skeleton in rads. LD50 is the dose that kills half the animals within the stated period.
Reference 37, a private letter
The human rows come from a letter of 6 April 1954 from Joseph G. Hamilton of Berkeley's Crocker Laboratory to Charles L. Dunham of the Division of Biology and Medicine.
Source PDF page 41 · 2 notes
The manuscript corrections
On all four lamb rows the printed dose figure has been struck through in ink and a new figure written beside it in hand. The struck figures cannot be read under the strike.
Experiments not yet run
The beagle and the lamb series are both marked as begun in the spring of 1954, and this report is dated July of that year. Their rows carry doses but no results.
Source PDF page 42 · 2 notes
The Argonne mouse series
References forty-eight and forty-nine are by Austin M. Brues, with Hermann Lisco and Miriam Finkel. Brues led research at Argonne National Laboratory from 1946 to 1962.
Reference 50, the human entry
The last entry is human and is set as a single line across the whole width of the table. It summarises a 1948 review by Cahan and others of sarcoma arising in irradiated bone.
Source PDF page 43 · 2 notes
References 1 and 2, Project Gabriel
The first two entries are the original study. Nicholas M. Smith Jr. began Project Gabriel alone at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in 1949 and reopened it in 1951. This report is its successor.
Reference 4, RAND R-251-AEC
The RAND Corporation report of August 1953 that gave Project Sunshine its name. Arnold Kramish, its first-named author, was a physicist who had worked on the Manhattan Project before joining RAND in 1951.
Source PDF page 44 · 2 notes
The classification letters
Every entry carries a letter: (S) secret, (OUO) official use only, (U) unclassified. On this leaf only the Hamilton letter is secret. The published radiotoxicity literature behind the report was open.
MDDC, AECU, ANL, ORO
Report numbers, not journals: MDDC the Manhattan District declassified series, AECU the AEC's unclassified series, ANL Argonne, ORO Oak Ridge Operations.