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At 6:45 am on March 1, 1954 the Earth rumbled and shook.
A massive crater was formed in the Pacific Ocean as the largest hydrogen bomb to ever
go off made its fateful detonation.
An orange and yellow explosion that could be described as glorious shot up a cloud of
radioactive debris that stretched four and a half miles (7243 meters) wide and 130,000
feet (39, 624 meters) high into the sky above Bikini Atoll, a tiny island that is part of
the Marshall Islands.
It left a crater in the ocean floor with a diameter of 6,510 feet (1,984 meters) and
a depth of 250 feet (76.2 meters).
Just to give you an idea of its magnitude, that’s more than 18 football fields wide
and almost an entire one deep.
This lethal debris was still falling about five hours later on Rongelap, an atoll 97
miles (156,107 meters) away, “where it came down like ashy snow,” so, naturally, “kids
played in it, and even went so far as to eat it.”
This is the story of Castle Bravo, the thermonuclear accident that ended up being 1,000 times more
powerful than Hiroshima.
Castle Bravo was the codename for what was ironically called The Shrimp — a device
that weighed 23,500 pounds (10659.412 kilograms) and was based on the Teller-Ulam thermonuclear
weapon design, named after scientist Edward Teller and mathematician Stanislaw Ulam.
Basically, the two set out to create a weapon that could be delivered by an aircraft.
Its design was novel because its different parts were linked and each part of the sequence
was intended to be powered by the part preceding it.
This means that if one of the first elements failed, so too would all of the subsequent
stages rendering the device useless -- sort of a high stakes dominos.
This design was also supposed to be an upgrade from Ivy Mike, a previous bomb model tested
in 1952, that had to be the size of a small building to support the equipment that allowed
its fuel to stay in its necessary liquid form.
So, not convenient at all.
Bravo used solid lithium deuteride, which meant none of this clunky equipment was necessary
for it to retain its form.
Bravo was the first part of Operation Castle, a mission that spanned two and a half months
and was the U.S.’s attempt to gather information on nuclear weapons.
They specifically wanted to focus on the shock the weapons generated, their blast radius
and proceeding fallout.
Operation Castle was a small part of the much bigger, secretive arms race between the U.S.
and the Soviet Union in the 1950s.
In 1950, the U.S. National Security Council released NSC-68, which was a 68-page secret
paper that suggested quadrupling defense spending in case the Soviets attacked.
Adding to the secrecy, classified studies at the time projected that by 1958, the U.S.
wouldn’t be able to retaliate against the Soviets in the case of an attack.
Back to Castle Bravo, though.
It exploded at 15 megatons, which was, well, slightly higher than the scientists had originally
projected.
In fact it was a whopping two and a half times more intense than they had anticipated and
can be attributed to some seriously complicated scientific miscalculations.
Essentially what happened was that scientists at the time didn’t realize that the solid
source of fusion fuel we mentioned earlier — a lithium deuteride - would react the
way it did in this extreme situation.
And as it turns out, a tiny scientific mistake can have almost unfathomable results.
An area of 7,000 miles surrounding Bikini Atoll was contaminated — most notably the
atolls of Rongelap and Utirik — and they felt the effects of radioactive poison almost
immediately and for decades afterward.
Radioactive material was spread to different parts all over the world, too, later found
in Japan, India, Australia, Europe and the United States.
Bravo’s dangerous rain was mostly made up of pieces of coral, radioactive particles
and water.
Alex Wellerstein, a scientist at the Stevens Institute of Technology, noted in a 2013 blog
post that what most likely happened during Bravo was that “small particles went up
with the fireball and stayed aloft long enough to lose most of their radioactive energy and
diffuse into the atmosphere, while heavy particles fell right back down again pretty quickly...
So blowing up and irradiating something like coral is just the worst possible thing,”
he wrote.
The people of Rongelap weren’t evacuated until three days after the blast — an eternity
to be exposed to such dangerous radioactive material lingering in the air.
They were exposed to radiation of 60 to 300 rem.
REM stands for one dose of radiation exposure.
Five to 10 of these alone are enough to change a person’s blood chemistry.
400 units could wipe out half of an exposed population.
To add to this, in studies as recently as 2010, the National Cancer Institute determined
that almost 170 cancer cases among residents of the Marshall Islands who were alive between
1948 and 1970 could be attributed to exposure to radiation.
Not all of the reasons why Castle Bravo went horribly wrong were due to scientific miscalculations
though, but in fact were caused by deception, negligence, and a combination of the two.The
winds were much more intense than scientists previously thought before carrying out the
test.
They concluded that the winds were suitable three days before the bomb, but a really irresponsible
duo — Major General Percy Clarkson, head of the military team that carried out the
test, and scientific director Dr. Alvin Graves — still went through with the plan even
though the winds were recognized as unfavorable just six hours before the blast.
U.S.S.
Curtiss, a Navy ship, was 23 miles from the detonation.
Writing for Medium, military historian Paul Richard helped us to picture what that day
was like for the men on that ship, noting that the heat was like having a blowtorch
applied to their bodies.”
Ouch.
It’s impossible to talk about Castle Bravo without also mentioning Lucky Dragon No.5,
a Japanese tuna fishing boat with a 23 man crew that was about 80 miles away from Bikini
Atoll when the test happened.
According to a documentary for the Maryland History Day competition, the men on the boat
witnessed “the sun rise mysteriously in the west” and heard a “symphony of thunder
and snow falling out of the sky” about an hour and a half after the initial explosion.
One crewmember died from the exposure and the others had adverse health effects as a
result.
One of these fisherman, Oishi Matashichi, remembered and described the Armageddon-like
scene like this:
“A yellow flash poured through the porthole.
Wondering what had happened, I jumped up from the bunk near the door, ran out on the deck,
and was astonished.
Bridge, sky, and sea burst into view, painted in flaming sunset colors.
I looked around in a daze; I was totally at a loss.”
Lucky Dragon also sparked international worry over the radioactive tuna that was aboard
the boat when the bomb exploded.
The Japanese called the whole event “a second Hiroshima.”
They also almost severed ties with the U.S. as a result.
A U.S. government doctor sent to Japan to help after the incident wrongly predicted
that those on the boat would recover in a month.
Six months later, Aikichi Kuboyama, the Lucky Dragon’s 40-year-old radio operator, succumbed
to the damage caused by the radioactivity and died, leading to the New York Times naming
him “probably the world’s first hydrogen-bomb casualty.”
Lucky Dragon also had a profound effect on how the Castle Bravo narrative was framed.
In a 2002 interview, physicist Ralph Lapp attributed Lucky Dragon as the singular event
that made the U.S. look bad, saying: “The story of the Lucky Dragon blew the lid off
secrecy because the Atomic Energy Commission could not keep it a secret.
This story had to be told…because radioactivity persisted and could deny territory to normal
use.
Furthermore, there was the fact that some of the chemicals in the fallout were highly
toxic fission products and this could be a health hazard.”
At this point, you might be wondering what happened to the people who were exposed to
the fallout.
Unfortunately, the reality of what happened was much more grim than anything that could
be conjured up for a riveting science fiction movie.
The U.S. attempted to redeem themselves after the calamity, but they still managed to screw
things up and cause even more long-term damage.
Because the people of Rongelap were among those hit the hardest, they became the test
subjects of a government-funded project called Project 4.1, more specifically named “The
Study of Response of Human Beings Exposed to Significant Beta and Gamma Radiation Due
to Fallout from High Yield Weapons,” which took place a week after Bravo.
The Rongelapese people weren’t given a translator to break down what was going on, so they were
essentially being tested on without proper consent.
They were given medication without being told why they should take them.
Pregnant women who were exposed to radiation eventually gave birth to deformed babies — some
of which included larger-than-normal heads and opaque skin.
None of these babies survived more than a few days after being born.
Thyroid tumors, especially among Rongelapese women, caused them to need corrective surgeries,
which limited their abilities to speak and sing, a devastating side effect since singing
is a revered part of Marshallese culture that goes back hundreds of years.
Tony deBrum, who would later become the foreign minister to the Marshall Islands, was nine
years old during Bravo.
From his perspective as just a kid, he remembered a “flash of light — silent and brighter
than the sun — and then watched the sky turn red as blood.”
That memory drove him in later years to make it his life’s mission to fight for the injustices
that happened to his people.
To a crowd at the United Nations in 2005, he said, “United States government documents
clearly demonstrate that its scientists conducted human radiation experiments with Marshallese
citizens.
Some of our people were injected with or were coerced to drink fluids laced with radiation.
Other experiments involved the resettling of people on islands highly contaminated to
study how human beings absorbed radiation from the food and environment.’
You could say Tony deBrum was the Marshall Islands’ hero.
He helped the Islands become independent of the United States in 1979 — and even helped
file a lawsuit against the U.S. for violating a treaty on nuclear nonproliferation, so,
Tony really wasn’t messing around.
You’d think the Castle Bravo disaster would be enough to stop nuclear bomb testing altogether,
but Operation Castle continued on — with a total of 67 nuclear weapons tested in the
Pacific Ocean.
The other five parts of the operation were named Romeo, Koon, Union, Yankee and Nectar.
It finally came to a semblance of an end with the Limited Test Ban Treaty, which was signed
and passed in 1963.
It required that any and all tests be done underground.
But it looks like there is some hope: Ever since 1992, the United States has relied on
simulations of nuclear weapons instead of the real thing.
The Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, which would forbid any nuclear tests, garnered signatures
from 184 countries in 1996.
So, while Castle Bravo led to a series of seemingly irreparable mistakes, there is a
light at the end of the long, long tunnel that this won’t ever happen again.
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