Nothing to Fear: The Unvested Interests of Rosalie Bertell
Part 5: Nuking space, caribou, and the fallout of the ‘Atomic Age’
[Part 1; Part 2; Part 3; Part 4]
When Rosalie Bertell visited the Inuit people in Baker Lake, Northwest Territory in 1988, she didn’t realize they were “newcomers” to the area. In the last book she would ever write, Planet Earth: The Latest Weapon of War, published in 2000, Bertell described how the Canadian government relocated the nomadic ‘caribou Inuit’ from their camps further inland, to Baker Lake in the late 1950s, because they were starving.1
“[T]he caribou, upon which the Inuit depended for food, clothing and shelter, had failed to migrate across the northern tundra – something that had apparently never happened before in the 3,000-year oral history of their people,” wrote Bertell.
Official reasons for the decline in caribou included over-hunting by the Inuit and Dene, wolf predation, a shift in caribou migration patterns, and a scarcity of plant life.
But, according to Bertell, there was something else that few were talking about.
“One of the women elders… said something to me in Inuktituk. My interpreter looked at me: ‘She says the death came from the sky.’ The Inuit People had seen the unnatural aurorae borealis,” wrote Bertell. Artificial auroras are caused by the release of electromagnetic pulses and radiation into the atmosphere, essentially creating an artificial geomagnetic storm, which is normally caused by the sun.
Artificial auroras can happen when nuclear bombs are detonated in the atmosphere.
“Some had made a connection between this and the fact that the caribou had failed them for the first time,” wrote Bertell.
USSR nuclear test, 1949 at the Semipalatinsk test site in Kazakhstan, code-named “First Lightening.” The Soviet Union conducted 456 nuclear tests (both atmospheric and underground) in their Arctic region at Semipalatinsk from 1949 until 1989—the highest concentration of nuclear explosions in one place and according to reports, the “deadly legacy” lives on.
In 2021—twenty years after Bertell’s book was published—an article appeared in the Journal of the History of Biology, by Jonathan Luedee who was at the time, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Toronto. Drawing on references dating back to the 1950s and 1960s, Luedee lays out how radionuclides were detected in the bodies of caribou in Canada’s north, demonstrating “the global reach of nuclear fallout.” In Luedee’s words, the “new problem” with the caribou was tied “directly to the ecological transformations unleashed since the onset of the atomic age.”
Luedee makes reference to the late biologist and professor William Pruitt, who, in 1962, when he was at the University of Alaska-Fairbanks, wrote about a “distinct northern pathway of exposure.” But because Pruitt was challenging the US Atomic Energy Commission’s stance that the exposures did not exceed the threshold of safety, he ended up having to report his findings in a lay magazine, “outside of officially approved channels.”2
The magazine was The Beaver—Magazine of the North, published by the Hudson Bay Company. Pruitt’s seminal article appeared in the 1962 winter issue and was titled, “A New ‘Caribou Problem.’” In it, the highly respected specialist in the ecology of northern animals noted that biologists had “struggled” for years to determine why Canada’s Barren Ground caribou herds were disappearing, and he had just figured out why.
Pruitt linked the “massive decline” in the caribou population to two things. The first, was the “progressive loss over many years of mature spruce-lichen forest.” But this, he wrote, “has now been superseded by another ‘caribou problem’ of even greater seriousness.”
“Caribou (and reindeer) are ‘hot spots’ in terms of contamination with radioactive material,” he wrote. “This is true of not only Canadian caribou but also those of Alaska, northern Scandinavia and northern USSR. Strontium-90 and Cesium-137 appear to be the primary contaminants. The source of these radionuclides is undoubtedly atmospheric nuclear explosions.”3
Pruitt reported that the levels of contamination being found in caribou bones was “far above the level set as ‘safe’” for humans, while contamination of other northern mammals was not as alarming. The reason was because of what the caribou were eating. Starting in 1959, researchers were finding “abnormally high radiation counts” in lichens.
Pruitt described the “lichen-caribou-human” radiation pathway:
Lichens are subject to radioactive contamination, particularly by fall-out from non-contained nuclear explosions because of their peculiar physiology…This form of life receives its nutrients directly from the air, from dust and other wind-blown material. Thus, a lichen feeds on a kind of natural fall-out. Now, however, [they] absorb man-made radioactive fall-out along with the natural nutrients [and] have evolved such efficient mechanism for retaining natural fall-out that they also retain virtually 100 per cent of the radioactive particles which fall onto them… because of their slow growth, lichens now contaminated will probably remain ‘hot’ for many years.
Pruitt argued that because caribou are at the base of the food chain in the North, “turning vegetation into a form that other animals, including man, can utilize,” the entire food chain was likely contaminated.
“Behind all the reassuring announcements and news releases about nuclear explosions since the beginning of the Atomic Age has lurked the spectre of the time when the so-called ‘safe limits’ would be exceeded. It is clear that for a great area of the earth’s surface that time has now come,” wrote Pruitt.
Cladonia lichen, part of the radiation pathway in the Arctic
Bertell touched on all this in her last book, but details were limited. Planet Earth is, after all, about weaponry and warfare and military research programs dating back to the 1940s. The scope of the book—spanning more than six decades of military machinations—is daunting, and staggering in its detail overall, covering everything from the use of depleted uranium in the Gulf War and in the Balkans, to how atmospheric nuclear testing and other military research including ionospheric heating—a subject we’ll return to later in this series—may have destabilized the Earth’s natural balance.
But for Bertell—someone who spoke up for the victims of industrial and military contamination—the story of the caribou and the Inuit was an important one to include in her book. Citing a number of researchers, she linked the nuclear fallout—particularly cesium 137—with the contamination of the caribou, through the lichen pathway, and the humans who ate them.4 Studies were also showing that cancer rates among the Indigenous people in the central Arctic were increasing, but according to Bertell, they were not being warned about either the contamination or their own high levels of cesium 137.
While Pruitt’s work did not figure into Bertell’s book directly, I can’t help but feel like they were birds of a feather. They were of the same generation—Pruitt died three years before Bertell did at the age of 87—and both were fearless and stood up against the powerful nuclear establishment, despite the toll this stance would take on their careers.
Nuclear testing tally 1945-2017, Arms Control Association. Note: US total (1,030) does not include the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan.
So, where was all this radioactive fallout coming from?
In her book, Bertell describes how the US started nuclear atmospheric testing in the Pacific Marshall Islands in 1946 and at the Nevada Test Site in 1951, as previously reported.5 By 1958—the year the ‘caribou Inuit’ were relocated to Baker Lake—the US had set off 194 nuclear bombs. The Soviets, who had begun atmospheric testing shortly after the US did, in 1949, had, by 1958, detonated 83 bombs in its Arctic region. The UK detonated 21 in that time period, on the Monte Bello Islands of western Australia, and in the Maralinga desert in southern Australia.6
Luedee explains that despite the fact that nuclear fallout and radioactive contamination was a “global environmental problem,” research was showing that its “impacts were not distributed evenly across the earth’s surface.”
“The highest concentrations of radioactive fallout at the earth’s surface were located at sites between 40° and 60° North, slightly to the south of the Arctic,” he writes.
“[S]cientific investigations had revealed how local ecological conditions—such as vegetation diversity, precipitation rates, and the presence of grazing animals—regulated the movement of radionuclides through northern food webs.”
According to a 2010 article that appeared in the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, “trade winds and precipitation patterns bring atmospheric radioactive fallout to the Arctic from nuclear test sites around the world,” and “the slow turnover of Arctic ecosystems makes radioactivity more persistent and longer-lived than in other environments.”
The vast majority of experimental nuclear tests— aimed at “proof-testing” new warheads, developing bigger and more effective weapons, as well as observing what the effects would be on infrastructure and living creatures—took place between 1945 and 1990. By the time the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) was opened for signatures in September 1996, prohibiting “any nuclear weapon test explosion or any other nuclear explosion," a total of 2,056 nuclear test explosions had already taken place: 1,528 occurred underground and 528 in the atmosphere. Of the total, the US was responsible for roughly half.7
According to Bertell, the atmospheric testing of nuclear bombs has resulted in there being “more than 157 million tons of radioactive chemical debris in the stratosphere gradually falling down on the northern hemisphere.”8
But something else happened in 1958 – something the US Department of Defense (DoD) called “the biggest scientific experiment ever undertaken.”9
Van Allen radiation belts protect the Earth from solar wind (Source: NASA)
In August and September 1958, from a location roughly 1,800 km southwest of Cape Town, South Africa, the US DoD launched and exploded three nuclear bombs in the Earth’s magnetosphere—an area that contains “giant magnetic force lines running between the magnetic poles, called the Van Allen belts,” wrote Bertell.
We now know that the Van Allen belts protect the Earth from solar wind—“the stream of charged high-energy particles emitted by the sun,” explained Bertell. But back in 1958, knowledge about the belts was extremely limited. American physicist, James Van Allen had only just discovered the radiation belts earlier that year, and using satellites, was able to ascertain that at two locations on Earth—over Mongolia and in the South Atlantic—the innermost Van Allen radiation belt dips down to within 200 km of the Earth’s surface. Everywhere else the inner belt occurs between 2,000 and 5,000 km from the Earth, and the outer belt is about 51,500 km from the Earth.
The missile launch location for the military operation codenamed ARGUS was chosen because it is where the South Atlantic Anomaly is located—where the innermost Van Allen radiation belt is closest to the Earth.
The military experiment, described in a 2012 issue of Smithsonian was “to blow up the Van Allen belts, or to at least disrupt them with a massive blast of nuclear energy,” so the closer they were to the target the better.10
According to Bertell, the purpose of the experiment was to “assess the impact” of a nuclear explosion in the magnetosphere “on radio transmissions and radar operations.”
“Through previous atmospheric explosions, the military had discovered that nuclear bombs create an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) that wipes out radio communication. The navy also wanted to increase understanding of the ionosphere and the behaviour of charged particles within it,” wrote Bertell.
But what happened next was unexpected.
“The nuclear explosions created new magnetic radiation belts and injected sufficient electrons and other energetic particles into the ionosphere to cause worldwide effects. It is not known how long these belts lasted but they were observed five years after the explosions. The electrons travelled back and forth along the newly created magnetic force lines, causing artificial ‘auroras’ when striking the atmosphere near the north pole,” wrote Bertell.
After a brief reprieve of about four years, during which there was a ban on atmospheric nuclear testing, the US and USSR resumed nuclear experimentation in space with little heed to the consequences. In what they called Operation Fishbowl, the US planned a series of five high altitude nuclear tests. One of them was Starfish Prime, the largest nuclear test ever conducted in outer space.
In July 1962 the US launched a missile from Johnson Atoll in the Pacific Ocean and detonated a nuclear warhead 400 km above the Earth’s surface. It was 1,000 X more powerful than the bomb the US dropped on Hiroshima. The result was not only the disruption of the inner Van Allen belt, but the formation of a new one.
Bertell wrote that the Soviet Union then undertook similar “planetary experiments” which created three new radiation belts above the Earth.
“The electron fluxes in the lower Van Allen belt have changed markedly since these high-altitude nuclear explosions and have never returned to their former state,” explained Bertell. “It could take many hundreds of years for the Van Allen belts to re-stabilize at their normal levels.”
Bertell:
“Experiments on the ionosphere began almost immediately after the Van Allen belts were discovered… we allowed nuclear bombs to be set off in the sky before we even knew what the sky was and what it did to protect Earth’s biosphere, and we exposed Earth’s people to radiation long before anyone knew just how dangerous that could be.”
In 1975 it was discovered that nuking space had a cumulative effect on a thin atmospheric layer that protects the viability of the Earth’s biosphere—the ozone layer.
Skies from Starfish Prime, July 1962, 45-90 seconds after detonation from Johnson Atoll in the Pacific Ocean. It was the largest nuclear test ever conducted in space, part of the US planned series of five high altitude nuclear tests in what they called Operation Fishbowl (Source: Los Alamos National Laboratory).
[Stay tuned for Part 6 where we’ll explore more of Bertell’s last book, Planet Earth: The Latest Weapon of War]
It should be noted here that while the ‘caribou Inuit’ were relocated because of starvation, not all Inuit relocation programs were for this reason. In the 1950s, Inuit were relocated to Chesterfield Inlet, Arviat, Rankin Inlet, Baker Lake, and Whale Cove. According to various sources, including this piece by ATPN, many Inuit believe that the real reason they were relocated was to populate (claim) areas of the Arctic for Canada.
According to Luedee, William Pruitt was hired by the Department of Biology at the University of Alaska-Fairbanks (UAF) to study mammals in the bioenvironmental program. Luedee writes: “During his research, Pruitt became increasingly interested in understanding the ecological mechanisms underlying the bioaccumulation of radioactive material in caribou bodies. The AEC [Atomic Energy Commission], however, reduced funding for the costly caribou studies and rejected Pruitt’s proposal to study the relationship between caribou and Arctic vegetation. Concerned about AEC censorship, Pruitt and his colleagues developed a strategy that involved disseminating their concerns and research findings outside officially approved channels.” When Pruitt publicly opposed “Project Chariot”—a US Department of Energy plan to detonate a string of five hydrogen bombs to create an artificial harbor in Cape Thompson, just south of Point Hope, Alaska—his position in the Department of Biology at UAF was terminated. While the project never went ahead, the “emergent network” of “dissenting scientists” insisted that even without “Project Chariot” there was a “profound threat to people living in northern communities due to the movement of radionuclides through the lichen-caribou-human food chain,” writes Luedee. In 1970 Pruitt went on to teach zoology at the University of Manitoba, where he remained for 30 years.
From Pruitt’s 1962 article, “A New Caribou Problem.”
Bertell referenced the 1956 work of C.E. Miller and L.D. Marinelli of the Argonne National Laboratory, who found the fallout product, cesium 137, in human bodies. She also referenced the 1961 work of Linden Kurt who found that cesium levels in Swedish reindeer exceeded that of beef cattle by 280 times. He also found cesium levels in Sweden’s Arctic people was 38 times higher than those who lived in the south. Bertell also referenced unpublished Environment Canada studies from 1965 by Peter M. Bird that showed that contamination levels in the region around Baker Lake were “the highest measured in a study of the Canadian north carried out by Health Canada.”
According to the Atomic Heritage Foundation: “In 1947, the Marshall Islands became part of the Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands, created by the United Nations and then administered by the U.S. In 1946, the islands had a population of 52,000. Between 1946 and 1958, the United States conducted 67 nuclear tests in the Marshall Islands. The U.S. conducted 23 of these tests at Bikini Atoll, and 44 near Enewetak Atoll, but fallout spread throughout the Marshall Islands.”
From Nuclear Testing Tally. There was a nuclear testing moratorium declared in 1958 between the US and the USSR –but it was only temporary. Nuclear testing resumed in full force by 1962.
It should be noted that the CTBT has been signed by 187 nations and ratified by 178. According to the Arms Control Association, the treaty cannot enter to force until it is ratified by 44 specific nations, and nine of these have yet to do so: China, India, Pakistan, North Korea, Israel, Iran, Egypt, Russia, and the US. Russia did ratify the CTBT in 2000, but it withdrew ratification in 2023 to “mirror the posture of the United States.” Despite these issues, “nuclear testing has become taboo,” says the Arms Control Association. “Today, even those nuclear-armed states that have not signed or not ratified the CTBT, including India, Israel, and Pakistan, observe nuclear testing moratoriums. Only one country has conducted nuclear test explosions in this century, and even that country—North Korea—halted nuclear testing in 2017. Although the CTBT has not formally entered into force, the treaty has, for now, achieved its primary goal: ending nuclear weapon test explosions.”
Quote taken from a speech Bertell gave on the occasion of receiving an honorary degree from Mount Saint Vincent University in 1985.
US DoD quote is originally from New York Times article by military editor Hanson Baldwin, about Project Argus: “US Atomic Blasts 300 Miles Up… 3 Devices Fired.” New York Times, March 19, 1959—which appeared roughly six months after the explosions took place. Important to note that Baldwin (and others) had known about the US plan weeks before the blasts took place, was not stopped from writing about the plan before it happened, but was told that if he printed the story, it could result in the public forcing the US to stop the testing. In a piece published in Time Magazine at the end of March 1959, titled, “The Press: The Times and the Secret,” Baldwin’s dilemma was explained this way: “The U.S. was on the defensive in the radiation fallout controversy, and Russia certainly would have made propaganda hay out of a story that the U.S. was planning to explode atomic bombs over the South Atlantic. Some scientists told Baldwin that if he printed the story, the furor might well force the U.S. to stop the tests. But it could also be argued that Baldwin had a duty to tell the American public in advance about an event that might have serious international implications. Baldwin decided to stay mum. Says he simply: ‘It was a question of whether or not you were going to hurt your country.’” A note at the end of the piece admits that Time Magazine also “had the outline of the story” in August [1958] from Pentagon Correspondent Edwin Rees, but, like Baldwin, also decided not to run a story about it.
It's truly hard to know what to say. Devastating. What on earth can be done to heal