Alvin C. Graves' Tie

Alvin C. Graves
Alvin C. Graves (1909–1965) was an atomic physicist and director of U.S. nuclear weapons testing for many years.

Graves was born in 1909 in Washington, DC, the youngest of six children. He graduated at the top of his class from the University of Virginia in 1931 with a bachelors degree in electrical engineering and later earned his Ph.D. at the University of Chicago.

In 1942 Graves was an assistant professor of physics at the University of Texas when he was invited to the University of Chicago to help build the first nuclear reactor there. He moved to Site Y in Los Alamos, New Mexico, in 1943, the year it opened and two years later headed the Test Division at Los Alamos. Graves was badly injured in a 1946 laboratory radiation accident in Los Alamos that killed Dr. Louis Slotin. The accident left him temporarily sterile and caused permanent loss to his vision.

Graves later served as test director for most of the Nevada Test Site shots during the 1950s. Graves received a great deal of later criticism for his handling of the nuclear tests which exposed many people to radiation. These included the Desert Rock exercises in which U.S. troops were close to the blast site, and the Marshall Islands tests that irradiated many Marshallese. He appeared in Operation Cue, a U.S. Civil Defense Administration movie about the effects of nuclear blasts.

He died of a heart attack in 1965. A follow-up study in 1978 suggested that his death was caused by complications resulting from his radiation exposure.

Castle Bravo Test
Castle Bravo was the code name given to the first United States test of a dry fuel thermonuclear hydrogen bomb, detonated on March 1, 1954 at Bikini Atoll, Marshall Islands, as the first test of Operation Castle. Castle Bravo was the most powerful nuclear device ever detonated by the United States (and just under one-third the energy of the most powerful ever detonated), with a yield of 15 megatons of TNT. That yield, far exceeding the expected yield of 4 to 6 megatons, combined with other factors, led to the most significant accidental radiological contamination ever caused by the United States. Fallout from the detonation — intended to be a secret test — poisoned some of the islanders upon their return, as well as the crew of Daigo Fukuryū Maru ("Lucky Dragon No. 5"), a Japanese fishing boat, and created international concern about atmospheric thermonuclear testing.

Effects
Graves was an atomic physicist who directed the nuclear weapons testing for the United States, leading most of the Nevada Test Site experiments as well as the Marshall Island tests. Probably one of the most famous nuclear tests, Castle Bravo, was performed on Bikini Atoll, only 120 kilometers from Rongelap Atoll's northern shore. Inhabitants of Rongelap were obviously exposed to the nuclear radiation, which caused leukemia, cancer, and jellyfish babies, among other things. Attempts to clean up the blast site are still questionably successful. The tie transmits nuclear radiation, which causes effects similar to what happened at Rongelap Atoll, notably headaches and loss of pigmentation in the skin. Wearing the tie will also cause the user to become temporarily sterile and permanantly blind.

Collection
Collected by Scalec, Garr9988, and Arthur Neilson in Crackerjack, Oklahoma when there were reports of people at a bank were losing skin pigmentation and becoming transluscent, as well as complaining of migraines.

Artie's report was: "People are complaining of migraines all through Crackerjack, Oklahoma, with the local bank being ground zero for the effects. All of the employees are suffering from increased headaches as well as losing skin tone and becoming translucent."