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Comment by fnordfnordfnord | Hacker News Reader

Notably, the cameraman did not volunteer for the job.

This article from 2010 was linked in the OP: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/14/science/14atom.html?pagewa...

Also, from the wikipedia entry on the AIR-2 Genie [0]:

Gamma and neutron doses received by observers on the ground were negligible. Doses received by aircrew were highest for the fliers assigned to penetrate the airburst cloud ten minutes after explosion.

Imagine for a moment being assigned to take a risk of developing a mortal condition.

[0] - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AIR-2_Genie

> Imagine for a moment being assigned to take a risk of developing a mortal condition.

Every action involves some risk of developing a mortal condition, and being in the military, particularly, involves notable risk of being assigned to tasks that have elevated risks of developing a mortal condition.

Of course, but remember that you're not being asked simply to fly a plane in a common way or to test some conventional device.

You're being asked to fly into a radioactive mushroom cloud to test if you get harmed or not.

And you're probably not even being asked but ordered, you don't have too much choice.

Oh, he died? Well, let's test again but 20 minutes later instead of 10

This was not the purpose of flying into the cloud.

I may be wrong on that, do you know what was then?

I don't know anything about this specific test, but the military goes to extraordinary lengths to train realistically for unusual and new war scenarios. (E.g., most US soldiers have been preparing for fighting in the presence of chemical weapons with gas masks, etc., for decades even though, to my knowledge, there's never been a large-scale usage since WW2.) But in this case, I'd wager they're taking scientific data for understanding the performance of the bomb; terrestrial bomb tests were huge exercises in data taking, and I don't know why airbursts would be different.

The link between radiation and cancer was established in the '20s, and certainly well-known (if poorly understood) by the time atomic weapons were developed. For instance, Muller got the Nobel prize for this work in 1947.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation-induced_cancer#Histo...

Certainly, safety rules weren't as conservative and stringent as they are today, but it's silly to think US soldiers were routinely and openly used as guinea pigs.

Thanks for the information.

They were taking samples of the air to obtain fission products and other clues to the performance of the weapon.

This is pretty important since you can both evaluate your weapon, and also to calibrate your instruments to use when collecting downwind of Soviet tests. Thus you can evaluate their weapons too.

Probably gamma ray spectroscopy which measures the energy of gamma rays in the cloud. When radioactive particles decay, they emit gamma rays at very specific energies so it would give us an understanding of the yield of the bomb and other important things for designing better weapons.

> Imagine for a moment being assigned to take a risk of developing a mortal condition.

What else would you call warfare?

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