I’ve been looking for this for days. I remembered that when I was a little boy that the Chinese tested a nuclear weapon and the fallout reached the United States very quickly. (I was ten years old.) My father used to make sure I saw historical things on television like all the Mercury and Gemini launches, so it was probably something he made sure I saw. I did not think I would find it but there it is, fallout traveling from the Lop Nur Test Site in China to all over the United States.
If any of you have any more on this, I want to see it.
James Pilant
Fig. 1. The Fifth Chinese Nuclear Test was Detonated on Dec. 28, 1966. It “involved thermonuclear material,” and, according to the AEC press release, was a nuclear test in the atmosphere at their test site near Lop Nor.” As indicated above, by the end of Dec. 31, 1966 the leading edge of its fallout cloud extended as far east as the dotted line shown running from Arizona to the Great Lakes. ORNL DWG. 73-4611
From the web site –Nuclear War Survival Skills
It produced fallout that by January 1, 1967 resulted in the fallout cloud covering most of the United States. This one Chinese explosion produced about 15 million curies of iodine- 131 – roughly the same amount as the total release of iodine- 131 into the atmosphere from the Chernobyl nuclear power plant disaster. (The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s preliminary estimate is that 10-50 million curies of iodine- 131 were released during the several days of the Chernobyl disaster; in contrast, its estimate of the iodine- 131 released during the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant accident, the worst commercial nuclear power plant accident in American history, is about 20 curies.)
Fig. 1 is from an Oak Ridge National Laboratory report, Trans-Pacific Fallout and Protective Countermeasures (ORNL-4900), written by the author of this book in 1970, but not published until 1973. No classified information was used in any version of this report, that summarized findings of the unclassified Trans-Pacific Fallout Seminar funded by the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission. This seminar was attended by experts who came from several research organizations and deliberated at Oak Ridge National Laboratory for two days in March of 1970.
Later in 1970 a final draft of this report was submitted to Washington for approval before publication. It was promptly classified. Publication without censorship was not permitted until after it was declassified in its entirety in 1973. None of the recommendations in this pioneering report were acted upon, but many of them are given in this chapter.
The findings and conclusions of the above mentioned 1970 Oak Ridge National Laboratory Trans-Pacific Fallout Seminar, summarized in the 1973 report, were confirmed by a later, more comprehensive study, Assessment and Control of the Transoceanic Fallout Threat, by H. Lee and W. E. Strope (1974; 117 pages), Report EGU 2981 of Stanford Research Institute.
Fallout from the approximately 300 kiloton Chinese test explosion shown in Fig. 1 caused milk from cows that fed on pastures near Oak Ridge, Tennessee and elsewhere to be contaminated with radioiodine, although not with enough to be hazardous to health. However, this milk contamination (up to 900 picocuries of radioactive iodine per liter) and the measured dose rates from the gamma rays emitted from fallout particles deposited in different parts of the United States indicate that trans-Pacific fallout from even an overseas nuclear war in which “only” two or three hundred megatons would be exploded could result in tens of thousands of unprepared Americans suffering thyroid injury.
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