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The biggest experiment in history – atomic bombing of Bikini Atoll

 Bikini Atoll became the centerpiece of a colossal military operation.

The hydrogen bomb that was detonated on this spot on March 1, 1954, created a fireball four miles wide and raised the temperature of the lagoon water to 99,000 degrees. The blast was 1,000 times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb and nearly three times stronger than its creators expected. It shook islands 250 miles away. It vaporized three islands in the atoll. And it killed every living thing in the air, on land, and in the sea for miles around.

PARADISE WITH AN ASTERISK, OUTSIDE MAGAZINE,  OCTOBER 17, 2012“……..Operation Crossroads, the most spectacular and expensive science experiment in history, was first proposed in August 1945, a few weeks after the U.S. dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. President Harry Truman had ordered the Army and Navy to conduct further tests of nuclear weapons. The reason, which sounds implausible if not ridiculous today, was to see if atomic bombs, when dropped on warships at sea, would sink them.

The U.S. had taken control of the Marshall Islands from the Japanese after World War II, and Bikini Atoll was chosen as ground zero. Its 167 residents, who lived in huts and fished and sailed their outriggers as they had for centuries, were persuaded to leave their homes “for the good of mankind and to end all world wars,” as the local U.S. military governor put it to them. They were shipped 125 miles east to Rongerik Atoll and given a few weeks’ worth of food and cheerful assurances that they could return as soon as the tests were over.

Meanwhile, Bikini Atoll became the centerpiece of a colossal military operation. By the summer of 1946, there were 42,000 military and civilian personnel in place, with 242 ships involved in the test, 156 aircraft, more than 300 cameras, and 18 tons of film. Since the whole point was to sink ships, an armada of 95 of them—the equivalent of the sixth-largest navy in the world at the time—were parked in the waters of Bikini lagoon, fully loaded with weapons and fuel. To see what the bombs might do to living things, 3,350 experimental rats, goats, and pigs were sacrificed on the decks. Servicemen sheared a number of them and put suntan lotion on their bare skin to see if that would somehow mitigate the effects of gamma radiation.
The first blast, code-named Able, was detonated on July 1 and, because the bombardier missed his target, was something of a dud. The July 25 Baker shot, however, was a monstrous success. Detonated under the ocean’s surface, it drove a 2,000-foot-wide column of water high into the sky in less than a second. A few moments later, millions of tons of atomized reef and water collapsed back into the lagoon, and a giant shock wave moved out across the water, sinking the 26,000-ton, 562-foot battleship Arkansas and lifting the stern of the 880-foot Saratoga 43 feet into the air. The shock wave released massive amounts of radiation, a phenomenon that was not widely understood at the time. One hundred and twenty-five miles away, the Bikinians, newly resettled on Rongerik and already running out of food, still thought they were coming back to their atoll. Soon.

And then, suddenly, we were there: a patch of midnight blue water in the transparent shallows of the lagoon. This was the Bravo crater, a mile wide and more than 200 feet deep, a place where imagination fails. The hydrogen bomb that was detonated on this spot on March 1, 1954, created a fireball four miles wide and raised the temperature of the lagoon water to 99,000 degrees. The blast was 1,000 times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb and nearly three times stronger than its creators expected. It shook islands 250 miles away. It vaporized three islands in the atoll. And it killed every living thing in the air, on land, and in the sea for miles around.

Three to four hours after the blast, the 64 inhabitants of neighboring Rongelap Atoll, next door to Rongerik, watched in wonder as the snowlike ash from Bravo began to fall on their island, reaching a depth of two inches. The children played in it. People drank water saturated with it. Soon they began to experience vomiting and diarrhea; their eyes burned, and their necks, arms, and legs swelled. The Americans had not bothered to tell the Rongelapese what they were planning to do………http://www.outsideonline.com/outdoor-adventure/nature/Paradise-With-An-Asterisk.html?168980656

November 6, 2012 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | history, OCEANIA, weapons and war