Posted on 02/10/2006 3:57:09 PM PST by SmithL
The detonations roll down the years in a place synonymous with Cold War history - Bikini Atoll.
About 3,500 kilometers southeast of Hawaii, in the azure waters of the Marshall Islands, "Operation Crossroads" - the first of a series of US atomic tests between 1946 and 1954 - irradiated much of the tiny Micronesian coral atoll and smashed a target fleet of aging warships anchored in its lagoon. In July 1946, two 23-kiloton atomic bombs, code-named "Able" and "Baker", were deployed to devastating effect. The United States served notice to Josef Stalin's Soviet Union of its resolve to dominate the new high
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ground of nuclear strategy and defend its hard-won victories of World War II.
The 60th anniversary of these first tests will be marked on July 1 and 25 this year and will take place as nuclear-proliferation issues are again dominating international geopolitics. Sixty years on from the Bikini tests, the spotlight is falling on Iran's and North Korea's potential acquisition of nuclear-weapons capability.
The Bikini experience has many lessons. Bikini reminds nuclear aspirants that the proven benefits of weapon possession - national prestige and geostrategic respect - are accompanied by huge financial costs: testing, maintenance, modernization and replacement. And then there are the dangers of managing a nuclear deterrence strategy - brinkmanship.
Paradise to Armageddon The atmospheric nuclear tests at Bikini in 1946 were two among 20 that took place in the so-called Pacific Proving Grounds between 1945 and 1963. They witnessed use of the fourth and fifth atomic weapons in history and the first since Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The deep freeze of the Cold War was setting in.
Today, after decades of testing (and then non-proliferation efforts by the US and other nuclear-armed powers), atmospheric, underwater and subterranean testing of nuclear weapons is demonized. These same powers, seeking to preempt 21st-century security threats, are united in opposition with the international environmentalist lobby.
But in 1946 there were no such concerns. The first atomic weapons unleashed in 1945 - from the Trinity tests in New Mexico to Hiroshima and Nagasaki - had been on land. Now it was to be water. A total of 167 islanders were evacuated from the atoll and more than 42,000 US service personnel arrived off Bikini to manage and observe.
The Able test consisted of a 23-kiloton "Fat Man" atomic bomb dropped by aircraft to airburst 158.5 meters over the Bikini lagoon on July 1. Baker was an identical device set to explode 27m underwater three weeks later on July 25.
Both tests were designed to measure fission weapons' effectiveness in eliminating enemy shipping concentrations. The Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs had weighed in at 15 kilotons each. Able and Baker were almost twice as powerful. From an assembled fleet of 240 ships, 90 appropriate targets were selected.
The roll call of ships offered up for nuclear sacrifice was in itself impressive. The 33,000-ton, 271m-long US aircraft carrier Saratoga led the tethered armada.
Saratoga had served with distinction at Guadalcanal and in the Indian Ocean against the Japanese. Anchored further out, in a concentric circle of steel, lay a second US carrier, Independence; the aging US battleships Nevada (survivor of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, and now a target ship painted entirely in orange), Arkansas, New York and Pennsylvania; cruisers Pensacola and Salt Lake City; 12 destroyers, including Lamson and Anderson; eight submarines, including Pilotfish and Apogon; and 19 transport ships, including Carlisle and Gilliam. Alongside were a host of landing craft, barges and a concrete dry dock. The ships carried thousands of monitoring devices and, aboard some, live animals.
Surrendered warships from the vanquished nations of the recent 1939-45 conflict were also placed in the target area. They included the huge Japanese battleship Nagato, bristling with 16-inch guns, cruiser Sakawa, and the German heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen - a magnificent vessel famous as the escort ship to the Bismarck. The Prinz Eugen had been christened a "lucky" ship by its crew, having emerged from the Battle of the Atlantic largely unscathed. Its luck finally ran out in July 1946, but it took both atomic blasts to sink it.
At exactly 9am local time on July 1, 23-kiloton Able was dropped by a US B-29 bomber, slightly off target, but to massive effect. Five ships sank; others caught fire or were scattered by wave damage. The entire lagoon was contaminated by radioactive fallout.
Three weeks later came the underwater test - Baker. A second 23-kiloton device, suspended under a US landing ship, exploded at 8:35am local time. The blast was powerful enough to lift Saratoga out of the water, and a vast water cloud chamber and mushroom cloud rose to more than 3,000m. Sixteen ships, including both Saratoga and Nagato, sank or were severely damaged. Again the entire area was flooded with radiation.
Film of the underwater Baker test, capturing the blast wave swamping the best of capital ships, was rushed to Washington: the footage became world-famous and to this day the humbling epitome of nuclear effectiveness.
Within days the surviving vessels had been reboarded, towed away and either decontaminated or sunk. Twelve ships were actually to remain in US Navy service after decontamination and returned to US ports. The bright-orange Nevada, badly damaged by both blasts, was used for target practice until 1948.
Geostrategic fallout The Bikini tests in 1946 had profound resonance and were to turbocharge the US-Soviet arms race.
Responding to Bikini, the Soviet Union tested its own atomic weapon in 1949, setting off an arms race that persisted until the Soviet collapse in 1991. The advent of Mao Zedong's Red China in 1949 and the Korean War of 1950-53 deepened this international tension radically. The post-1945 world became one where use of nuclear weapons was always an active foreign-policy consideration.
With Operation Crossroads pronounced a major success, the program continued in the atoll until 1958, and elsewhere in the South Pacific until 1963, witnessing even more powerful hydrogen-bomb explosions. In response to later tests at Bikini, the Soviets were to carry out the largest experiment to date - a 50-megaton thermonuclear device exploded in the Russian Arctic in 1961.
But the cost of Operation Crossroads was huge (more than US$1.3 billion) and, as the arms race accelerated through the 1950s and 1960s, US spending would rise inexorably. The world moved from bipolar to multipolar possession of nuclear arsenals. Nuclear weapons were worn by their possessors ostentatiously and expensively on the hip.
And Bikini underwrote US nuclear strategic confidence in the run-up to the Cuban missile crisis of 1962 - the greatest scare of the Cold War.
As that crisis passed, atmospheric testing of the Bikini type was abandoned. The Limited Test Ban Treaty of 1963, signed by the US, China and Britain, banned all but underground testing. From the late 1960s to the late 1990s, nuclear non-proliferation efforts, accompanied by Byzantine international diplomacy, were boosted by the collapse of the Soviet Union.
In 1992 the US ended all testing - having detonated more than 1,200 weapons since 1945 - in favor of computer-based simulations. In the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CBT) of 1996, the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council agreed to outlaw all explosive testing in principle.
The CBT brought the Cold War test era to an end. French tests of its force de frappe, conducted in the Pacific since 1960, ceased. Britain, with a long history of atomic testing, at Christmas Island in the Pacific and in Australia, had conducted its last low-yield test in 1991. The final Soviet test took place in 1990, with the Russian Federation extending test moratoriums. China, which had tested since 1964, halted atmospheric tests in 1980 and all declared testing by 1996.
But the picture today is far from rosy. The CBT remains a flawed document as critical signatories have yet to ratify it (US, Russia and China). More recent nuclear powers have also refused to ratify (Israel, Pakistan and India).
In the late 1990s, North Korea's secretive plutonium and uranium programs - Pyongyang may now have several weapons or is a nuclear bluffer par excellence - have cast ripples of uncertainty across Asia and beyond. And Pakistan's and India's kiloton-strength tests of May 1998 refocused world attention on the nuclear issue as never before.
International attention has now shifted to Iran after its stated resumption of uranium enrichment and referral to the UN last Saturday. Its next moves will have profound ramifications for the Middle East nuclear theater.
Amid concerns that a nuclear-armed Iran could set off a new Middle Eastern arms race - with Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Turkey following suit - the added possibility of preemptive military action by either Israel or the United States, or both, has become the stuff of regional nightmares.
History whispers from the lagoon Bikini's experience is a salutary reminder to aspirant nations of the awesome power and responsibilities of nuclear weapons - though in comparison with H-bomb tests in the 1950s, those of 1946 were firecrackers. The 15-megaton "Bravo" hydrogen-bomb test at Bikini in 1954, for example, completely vaporized the nearby islands of Bokonijien, Aerokojlol and Nam, leaving a huge crater.
In 2006, Bikini Atoll is a lonely but impressive diving site and radiation levels in the lagoon are deemed acceptable for tourism - safe to walk on but not to farm foodstuffs. Levels of cesium-137 are still judged too high on the atoll for year-around habitation.
Bikini remains a US scientific research site, monitoring radiation and cleanup initiatives. The islanders evacuated in 1946 and their descendants are permitted visits once a year only and are embroiled in compensation and right-of-return disputes. The South Pacific has been nuclear-free since March 1996 when the US, Britain and France agreed protocols to a South Pacific Nuclear Free Zone Treaty.
Part of the Republic of the Marshall Islands, the atoll itself is tiny: 237 hectares surrounding a lagoon in an archipelago dotted across 386 kilometers. A broken circle of 23 coral and sand islands in stunning waters - sea temperatures in the mid-20s Celsius, with outstanding visibility - from the air the atoll resembles the whitened bones of a shark's jaw, with broken teeth. The teeth are the sunken nuclear fleet.
Ten ships lie in the atoll, with others scattered in neighboring waters: the Prinz Eugen sank off Kwajalein Island to the southeast while being towed away from the Baker blast site. The Saratoga, sitting upright on the bottom of Bikini lagoon, 58m down, now welcomes occasional divers down to its ghostly flight deck.
For those hoping to develop nuclear weapons, Bikini's history points to both their utility and their burden.
The possession of nuclear weapons, so the argument goes, deters aggression and major conflicts - Europe since 1945 being the classic example. In 2006, Asian and Middle Eastern powers are in theory similar "rational actors" - regional players that know that actual use of nuclear weapons, even with vastly smaller yields, would be a cataclysmic prospect. Fallout would drift lethally with the region's prevailing winds, from west to east, and truly accord with the old Cold War strategic concept of mutually assured destruction (MAD).
In this sense Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinejad's statement last October - "Israel must be wiped off the map" - has perhaps more in common with Nikita Khrushchev's famous 1956 outburst, "We will bury you!" The world has been here before: brinkmanship and colorful rhetoric are nothing new.
Then there is the cost. Above all, entry into and membership of the nuclear club remains hugely expensive. The price of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's successful and heroic deterrence of Soviet ambitions during the Cold War was perhaps $8 trillion, according to Cold War: An Illustrated History by Jeremy Isaacs and Taylor Downing. It was probably much more. The cost to the US of nuclear weapons from 1940 to 1998 alone was estimated by the Brookings Institution at $5.48 trillion, or $35 billion per year.
The burdens continue. Britain is soon to carry out multibillion-pound modernization of its Trident submarine-launched nuclear system. And just three weeks ago, with an eye to the alleged ambitions of Iran and other states, French President Jacques Chirac made a speech intimating that his country would not hesitate to use nuclear weapons, whatever the cost, if its national interests dictated it.
As policymakers and journalists mark the events 60 years ago at Bikini Atoll, the message will be clear. Permanent membership in the nuclear-weapon club is a reassuring adjunct to national security and political rhetoric. But possession also portends a Pandora's Box of decision-making, and only those with the deepest pockets should apply.
If that's Pandora, I want her address...
An article with the word 'bikini' in it needed some spicing up. Alas, it's Brigitte from about 50 years ago so I don't really think you want her address anymore.
bttt
No bikini atoll!
Ping...
Thanks SunkenCiv
Huh. I never knew what happened to that ship. Thanks for the article.
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