Operation Ivy: Part I, Mike
At 5:29 a.m. on July 16, 1945, the United States conducted the world's first nuclear test explosion at Alamogordo, New Mexico. Within a month, nuclear weapons were used to destroy the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Japan surrendered on September 2, 1945 and the war in the Pacific finally ended, almost a full four months after the fighting in Europe had ceased. Although World War II officially ended and the Allied powers were still aligned in the United Nations, tensions were building between the United States and the Soviet Union who detonated their own nuclear weapon in 1949.
News that the Soviet Union had developed its own nuclear fission weapons and thus ended the U.S. monopoly provoked President Truman to respond by building a super weapon based on emerging fusion technology. Many weapon designs were rejected until the Mike device was proposed. This concept involved the cooling of hydrogen fuel to a liquid form near absolute zero and then fusing the hydrogen nuclei into helium using an atomic bomb as the trigger. The Mike device did not come about with controversy; many argued that the Soviets could be persuaded not to develop these powerful weapons if the U.S. would refrain while others argued that the such weapons were not much more effective than high yield fission bombs.
Advocates of fusion prevailed, and on November 1, 1952, the U.S. tested the Mike device, the first thermonuclear or hydrogen bomb ever detonated, on the island of Elugelab at Enewetak Atoll in the Marshall Islands. The Mike device was the first in a series of two detonations in the Enewetak Atoll that were collectively called Operation Ivy. The latter Ivy test was a high yield fission weapon named King that was tested as a backup to ease any sense of national vulnerability had the Mike device unsuccessfully detonated.
Ivy Mike produced a 10.4-megaton yield or the equivalent of an explosion 500 times more powerful than the fission bomb dropped on Nagasaki. The 3.25-mile diameter fireball from the blast created a heat wave that could be felt immediately by the 11,650 military personnel and civilians observing the blast from a distance of 30 to 40 miles away. The ensuing mushroom cloud rose to a height of 27 miles (or 32 Empire State Buildings stacked upon one another), and where the island of Elugelab had once been there was now an ocean filled crater a mile long and 175 feet deep. Shortly after the detonation, a cloud sampling pilot was lost at sea after his aircraft ran out of fuel, and crews in two other aircraft sent out to rescue him were overexposed and received radiation dosed ranging from 10 to 17.8 rem (exceeding the maximum permissible limit of 3.9 rem).
The “Operation Ivy” film from the Prince Preston Collection at the Russell Library for Political Research and Studies was declassified in 1997. This film is half of a two-part series called Operation Ivy and features the Mike detonation. Originally created for an audience of military and civilian officials with top-secret clearances, “Operation Ivy” is just one example of the many films that were made by the U.S. government documenting the early stages of the nuclear age. A news story produced by CNN at the time of the film's 1997 declassification perhaps best explains the film's strange combination of Hollywood-style dramatics and the detonation of the deadliest weapon as a graphical illustration of two misconceptions from the dawn of the nuclear age: “One, an underestimation of the deadly effects of radioactivity . . . [and] the other the belief that atomic weapons were viable options rather than horrific weapons of last resort.”
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