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On August 9, 1951, an atomic bomb exploded in the sky over Vancouver.

“It detonated 550 metres above sea level, directly above the intersection of Granville and Hastings Streets,” wrote Bill Ryan in The Vancouver Sun. An estimated 50,000 to 100,000 people were killed, injured or missing.

“Panic, the partner of unpreparedness, raced with terrifying speed through the streets not entirely stunned by the explosion,” Ryan wrote.

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“Furious, housewives from the suburbs rushed into the city center to search for their husbands and sons. Most fled inland in helpless panic, away from the towering pillar of doom.

“Seconds that seemed like an eternity passed before the stunned residents of Point Grey, South Vancouver and Kitsilano could bring themselves to whisper: ‘An atomic bomb!'”

Ryan’s story was, of course, completely fictitious.

But The Sun devoted an entire page to describing the consequences for the city if a “Hiroshima-type atomic bomb” were to hit Vancouver.

Ryan had been studying the nuclear issue for a year, ever since he spent a week in Seattle in 1950 attending a conference on the effects of an atomic bomb on a city.

More than 100 “civil defense planners and experts” from Canada, the United States and Great Britain had gathered in the Emerald City to learn about and prepare for the horrors that lay ahead.

It was the height of the Cold War, and people took the threat of nuclear attack seriously. Vancouver Mayor Charles Thompson and Police Commissioner Walter Mulligan both attended the Seattle conference and supported testing a “theoretical atomic bomb attack” as part of Vancouver’s “civil defense preparations.”

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It took a year, but finally The Sun ran an article titled “If an atom bomb fell on Vancouver.”

It included a surprising map/graphic that illustrated the impact on the city center.

If the bomb were dropped on Granville and Hastings, the city centre and most of the West End would be enclosed in a ring marked “total destruction”.

“Most people within this ring would succumb to either the tremendous heat, gamma rays, blast and shock, or the ensuing fires,” the graphic’s caption reads.

The impacts would then spread in a circular pattern. The zone of “major destruction” would affect parts of Kitsilano as well as most of Fairview and Strathcona.

“The City Hall, Granville and Burrard bridges are located (here) and there is a risk of serious damage,” it said.

A third area, designated “low destruction,” would affect most of Kits, South Granville, Mount Pleasant and Grandview-Woodland to West 33rd in the south, Alma in the west and Rupert in the east.

To the north, a strip of North and West Vancouver would be slightly damaged, including the Lions Gate Bridge.

“Depending on the contours of the terrain,” the destruction would extend “up to 13 kilometers.” Fires would devastate much of the area that was not destroyed in the original explosion.

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“Where once the heart of a city had been, intricate and orderly, there was now only a festering scar,” Ryan wrote.

“A seething cauldron of flames and smoke, purple and pinkish-brown, smothered the area to a height of 100 feet or more. From the flames and smoke rose a white-gray plume of smoke skyward.

“The hallmark of the atom bomb explosion, the puffy white tip of the mushroom cloud, had now risen to a height of 40,000 feet.”

What remained was an “ugly brown saucer scooped out of the earth in the area roughly between Columbia Street, Coal Harbour, Smithe and Thurlow,” Ryan wrote.

“The Vancouver Hotel and the Marine Building had been reduced to rubble, the CPR depot had been wiped out. St. Paul’s Hospital had been brutally attacked. The upper floors were missing. Screaming patients hung from floor shelves where the wall had collapsed.”

Ryan worked as a feature writer and editor for The Sun and Province from 1944 to 1961. He seemed to have a penchant for stories of impending disaster – in April 1954 he teamed up with the flamboyant photographer Ray Munro for a story for the Province entitled “Sabotage team ‘wipes out’ Vancouver in two hours.”

In the story, Ryan and Munro posed as saboteurs who placed “packages the size of portable atomic bombs” at strategic points in Vancouver.

After working for several years as the province’s business editor, he gave up journalism in 1961 to work in public relations for lumber giant MacMillan Bloedel.

[email protected]

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