and radiation sensors and telescopes and men that would be needed; flotillas of ships brought in heavy materials (cement, steel, bulldozers, backhoes, tons of protective lead shielding); and the navy started ferrying in scores of old and captured ships of every type imaginable, which were to be set down at fixed positions in the lagoon and used as targets.
More than forty thousand men were soon to be involved out in the western Pacific—eating, inter alia, twenty tons of meat and seventy thousand candy bars every single day—making sure the testing program went ahead as scheduled. For everyone knew that with the help of their spies, the Soviets were breathing hard down the Americans’ necks. And those in the U.S. Navy knew, or suspected, that their very profession, their navy, could well be imperiled, because sinking their ships with atomic bombs was now, apparently, quite as easy as shooting fish in a barrel.
Operation Crossroads was to be the first of the 55 nuclear test programs (most of which involved several separate tests) that would be run by the United States over the next half century. The total of 1,032 atomic bombs that America has exploded since 1945 far exceeds the combined totals of all the other nuclear devices exploded by all other nuclear-capable countries in the world. In later years the United States would conduct tests of different kinds of delivery systems (of gravity drops, ballistic missiles, artillery shells, mines) and for different kinds of uses and customers (for the army; for use in outer space; even for peaceful uses, such as digging great trenches in the earth). Most of these later tests would be carried out in the deserts of Nevada, many of them underground. But the most impressive first 67 of these tests were carried out in the Pacific, and the biggest and most symbolic was on Bikini itself.4
Though only twenty-three tests were carried out there, the TNT-equivalent tonnage of each of the bombs was enormous; and because the Bikini weapons taken together were so huge (and because the tests of two of them, as we shall see, went so badly wrong) those twenty-three tests account for more than 15 percent of the total power of all the atomic explosions triggered in the history of all American testing.
Crossroads was the very first of these tests, and it was specifically designed for the benefit of the navy: the ships being led into the anchorage in the weeks leading up to the first of the two main explosions were to be steel-clad guinea pigs, the first nonhuman victims of the Pacific’s atomic age.
Navy crews first assembled a total of seventy-three ships toward the eastern end of the lagoon, some four miles southwest of Bikini Island. The vessels were clustered in concentric circles around a red-and-white-painted American superdreadnought battleship, the USS Nevada, the ship that had famously managed to get away during the Pearl Harbor attack, despite being hit by a torpedo and bombs during the raid. She was old, built in 1914, and the navy thought that choosing her to be the bull’s-eye for the first A-bomb test would permit her to die with dignity, still in service to her country.
But she didn’t die. In the end, the bombardier of the plane that carried the first bomb up from the airfield at Kwajalein—the Able shot, as it was termed—proved less than competent and missed her by seven hundred yards. She didn’t sink, was nicely repaired, and limped back into service for two more years.
This bomb used for the Crossroads Able shot was almost identical in design and delivery to the weapon that had been dropped on Nagasaki a year previously, was essentially the same as the first-ever test weapon exploded weeks beforehand in New Mexico: it was a Fat Man, with a plutonium core, and it was set to detonate in midair five hundred feet above the target. It did so, precisely on schedule if not precisely on target, at 9:00 a.m. on July 1, 1946.
Its explosion, and its effects, turned out to be only moderately spectacular. The press—more than a hundred reporters were gathered on ships moored outside the lagoon5—was seemingly compelled to display reverent ecstasies of purple prose. And who could blame them? After all, the first three atomic explosions had been witnessed only by American military personnel or by the victims. Almost no American civilians had ever seen such a thing—another reason that Bikini, as the mise-en-scène for the weapons’ first public display, remains so symbolically important a place, and why the Pacific, as backdrop, remains the most nuclear of the world’s oceans.
The New York Times reporter aboard the USS Appalachian, William Laurence, was dutifully awed, dictating over the ship’s wireless:
As I watched the pillar of cosmic fire from the sky-deck of this ship it was about eighteen miles to the northeast. It was an awesome, spine-chilling spectacle, a boiling, angry, super volcano struggling toward the sky, belching enormous masses of iridescent flames and smoke and giant rings of rainbow, at times giving the appearance of a monster tugging at the earth in an effort to lift it and hurl it into space.
From this point I watched the atomic bomb as it burst. It was like watching the birth and the death of a star, born and disintegrated in the instant of its birth. The new-born star made its appearance in a flash so dazzling no human eye could look at it except through goggles that turned bright daylight over the Pacific into a pitch-dark night. When the flash came it lighted up the sky and ocean with the light of many suns, a light not of the earth.
The journalists’ ardor cooled somewhat over the coming days. The Times triple-decker front-page headline on the morning after intimated, at least among the editors, an early degree of sobriety, verging on disappointment. “Blast Force Seems Less Than Expected,” it read, and the lead paragraph’s obligatory description of the bomb’s initial dazzling flash as “ten times brighter than the sun” was followed by a cautionary “but,” and by the news that of the seventy-three ships moored inside the atoll, only two had actually been sunk. The paper may have been a little hasty, because actually five went down: two old American destroyers, two transport ships, and, eventually, the graceful Japanese cruiser Sakawa, which had been seriously damaged and which foundered as she was being towed from her anchorage. She nearly dragged the towing tug down with her, though panicking crewmen cut the towline with acetylene torches in the nick of time.
Aside from being the first atomic bomb detonation ever seen publicly, the Able shot is now probably best remembered for what it failed to do—and because some of the failures were positive, and confirmed what Admiral Blandy had reassured everyone days beforehand: “The bomb will not start a chain-reaction in the water converting it all to gas and letting the ships on all the oceans drop down to the bottom. It will not blow out the bottom of the sea and let all the water run down the hole. It will not destroy gravity.” It didn’t set fire to any of Bikini’s palm trees, either.
But it also didn’t do what was hoped for. It didn’t seem to stir much agitation among the immense fleet arrayed around the drop zone. It damaged generally only rather small ships that were very close to the explosion’s center. It failed to sink the USS Nevada; it failed to sink the enormous Japanese battleship Nagato—a fate that many had hoped for, since Nagato had been Admiral Yamamoto’s flagship during the raid on Pearl Harbor, and her destruction would have been rich in retributive symmetry. It also failed to sink the former German pocket battleship Prinz Eugen, which was at the time a commissioned ship of the U.S. Navy, having been claimed as a war prize and been brought all the way to Bikini from Wilhelmshaven by a German American crew.6
The bomb also didn’t do as much damage to the animals that had been posted onto some of the ships as stand-ins for crewmen. There were goats in gun turrets, rats at the radar screens, pigs on the poop decks, mice by the mainmast, and rodents by the score just about everywhere. Three quarters of them survived, for a while, some of the goats chewing away unconcernedly while all hell was breaking out about them. Two celebrated survivors, Pig 311 and Goat 315, remained so healthy for so long that they were brought to Washington, DC, and put on display at the zoo.
The
