The first test of that series was Castle Bravo, a new design utilizing a dry fuel thermonuclear hydrogen bomb.
Bikini atoll explosion code#
The next series of tests over Bikini Atoll was code named Operation Castle. The United States was in a Cold War Nuclear arms race with the Soviet Union to build bigger and better bombs. Seaborg, the longest-serving chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, called Baker "the world's first nuclear disaster." The Baker test's radioactive contamination of all the target ships was the first case of immediate, concentrated radioactive fallout from a nuclear explosion. The testing began with the Operation Crossroads series in July 1946. The test weapons were detonated on the reef itself, on the sea, in the air and underwater with a combined fission yield of 42.2 Mt. The nuclear weapons testing at Bikini Atoll program was a series of 23 nuclear devices detonated by the United States between 19 at seven test sites.
Though organized as a secret test, Castle Bravo quickly became an international incident, prompting calls for a ban on the atmospheric testing of thermonuclear devices. The fallout spread traces of radioactive material as far as Australia, India and Japan, and even the United States and parts of Europe.
The size of the Castle Bravo test on 1 March 1954 far exceeded expectations, causing widespread radioactive contamination. This bomb consumed the infamous Demon core that caused the death of two scientists in two separate criticality accidents. Aerial view of the Able test, a 23 kilotons of TNT (96 terajoules) device detonated on Jat an altitude of 520 feet (160 m).
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