Posted on 03/02/2015 6:55:46 AM PST by C19fan
Sixty-one years ago on an island in the South Pacific, scientists and military officers, fishermen and Marshall Islands natives observed first-hand what Armageddon would be like.
And it almost killed them all. The Atomic Energy Commission code-named the nuclear test Castle Bravo.
The March 1, 1954 experiment was the first thermonuclear explosion based on practical technology that would lead to a deliverable H-bomb for the Air Force’s Strategic Air Command—part of the Operation Castle series of tests needed to manufacture the high-yield weapons.
Bravo was the worst radiological disaster in American atomic testing history—but the test provided information that led to a lightweight, high-yield megaton bomb that would fit inside a SAC bomber.
(Excerpt) Read more at realcleardefense.com ...
Quite so. One of the great talents a scientist or engineer must have is to recognize it when he has just discovered something important.
My Dad was at Ivy Mike. That was the “wet” device on Eniwetok Atoll.
The condition Mme Curie was in when she died is a good example of why we have those lab practices ...
Recall that, waiting in the bunker during the countdown for Trinity, Enrico Fermi (I think it was Fermi) started taking bets on whether the Gadget would light the atmosphere on fire and incinerate the planet.
That’s where the “unknown unknowns” come in.
Correct.
We also don’t put fluoroscopes in shoe stores or radium paint on watch dials.
—the technicians had to stay in the sealed blockhouse for much longer until the detonation effects dissipated. —
Wasn’t this the test shot where they had to evacuate and suddenly realized they didn’t have any protective clothing at all? They had to high-tail it out of there with sheets wrapped around their bodies?
Saw that on a program about the race for the ‘superbomb’. The Sovs lit one off in the arctic circle that was 50 megatons. Sakharov said while they could have went higher, any higher tonnage was a waste, because the fireball would be taller than the Earth’s atmosphere.
That turned out to be an incorrect hypothetical construct. Former member of AFSWP What the physicists KNEW was that u-238 Was NOT fissionable.
When the Russians tested Tsar Bomba, they were actually VERY lucky the yield of the bomb was only 50 MT--had it been the full 100 MT, there was a very high chance the plane that dropped the bomb would have been destroyed by the blast effects of the 100 MT blast.
The most powerful nuclear weapon fielded by the USA was the B41 gravity bomb, which had a yield of 25 MT. There was serious studies to add another detonation "stage" to the weapon to 45 MT, but given the safety issues of such a big explosion, the proposal never became a real weapon. The most powerful widely used nuclear weapon we had was the B53, which had a yield of 9 MT and just only retired in the last few years; this bomb in warhead form was the device used on the Titan II missile.
They are simply to assist in observing the plume dynamics.
“The Bravo shot in 1954 was not the first test at Bikini Atoll, part of the 140,000-square-mile Pacific Proving Grounds. Nor would it be the last—from 1946 to 1958”
Note that these are EXACTLY the same years as most of the Baby Boom generation were born. I’m convinced their milk was contaminated by this testing.
Very good article. As I read it, I could not help but think someone at the test site said “Hey y’all, watch this” before pressing the red button.
For the weapons geeks
http://nuclearweaponarchive.org/Usa/Tests/Castle.html
Most interesting to me about this test was the fact they had no idea the effect on Lithium 7 from the reaction, thereby amplifying the yield 2.5x.
Of course, this illustrates why a very handy hydrogen storage medium is illegal to sell (Lithium 6)...
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