David Bradley, 92, antinuclear advocate, ski designer, physician, and author
NEW YORK - David Bradley, a writer, surgeon, and antinuclear advocate whose best-selling first book, "No Place to Hide," was an eyewitness account of the postwar atomic tests on Bikini Atoll, died Jan. 7 in Norway, Maine. He was 92. A former resident of Hanover, N.H., Dr. Bradley had lived in Norway in recent years.
Dr. Bradley's family confirmed the death.
Published in 1948 by Little, Brown & Co., "No Place to Hide" was a journal of his time as a US Army medical officer on Bikini in the summer of 1946. His job was to monitor radiation levels after the first two nuclear tests there. From 1946 to 1958, the United States conducted 23 tests on Bikini.
Reviewing "No Place to Hide" in The New Yorker, E.B. White wrote: "Dr. Bradley's is a peculiarly effective book, I think. It is casual, personal, and written by a man who seems to have the mind and training of a scientist, the eyes and ears of a poet. He probed the fringes of the hottest fire that has yet been lit and wrote down what he felt and what he wondered."
Dr. Bradley was also, variously, a newspaper correspondent, a national skiing champion and successful ski-jump designer, an Olympic team manager, and a New Hampshire state legislator.
David John Bradley was born Feb. 22, 1915, in Chicago and reared in Madison, Wis., where his father taught physiological chemistry at the University of Wisconsin Medical School.
In 1938, Dr. Bradley earned a bachelor's degree in English from Dartmouth, where he competed in skiing. He was the 1938 US champion in the Nordic combined event, which comprises cross-country skiing and ski jumping. He was named to the 1940 Olympic ski team, though the games were canceled because of the war in Europe.
After graduating from Dartmouth, he studied English and history at Cambridge University before traveling to Finland, where he covered the Russo-Finnish Winter War of 1939-40 for The Wisconsin State Journal and other Midwestern newspapers. He earned his M.D. from Harvard in 1944 and afterward entered the Army. In 1960, he returned to Finland, where he spent two years teaching American literature at the University of Helsinki. His book about Finland, "Lion Among Roses" (Holt, Rinehart & Winston), was published in 1965.
A designer or renovator of more than 60 ski-jumping hills throughout the Northeast, Dr. Bradley was the manager of the US Nordic ski team at the 1960 Olympic Games in Squaw Valley, Calif. He was inducted into the US National Ski and Snowboard Hall of Fame in 1985.
From 1955 to 1959 and from 1973 to 1975, he was a Democratic legislator in the New Hampshire House of Representatives.
Dr. Bradley's first marriage, to Elisabeth Bancroft McLane, ended in divorce. He leaves his second wife, the former Sally Tucker Smart; six children from his first marriage, Kim Emmons, of Norway, Maine; Darby, of Calais, Vt.; Wendy Morgan, of Peacham, Vt.; Ben, of Thetford, Vt.; Bronwen Ballou, of Hanover, N.H.; and Steven, of Peacham; a stepson, Kevin Smart, of Norway, Maine; two brothers, Richard, of Colorado Springs, and William, of Boulder, Colo.; 11 grandchildren; and six great-grandchildren.
His other books include "Expert Skiing" (Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1960; with Ralph Miller and Allison Merrill); and "Robert Frost: A Tribute to the Source" (Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1979).
