From a Tropical Paradise to a Nuclear Hell
"There's a story I can tell you," a fellow called Bruno Lat said to me a few years back. "I was 13. My dad was working with the Navy as a laborer on Kwajalein" -- an atoll in Lat's native Marshall Islands, controlled by the U.S. military. "It was early, early morning. We were all outside on that day waiting in the dark. Everybody was waiting for the Bravo."
That day was 50 years ago: March 1, 1954. Bravo was not the first, or the last, just the worst of the American nuclear tests in the Pacific -- a fission-fusion-fission reaction, a thermonuclear explosion, an H-bomb, the United States' biggest blast. In today's poverty of expression, it would be called a WMD. Except that it was ours, and so real that days after marveling at a sky alight with "all kinds of beautiful colors," young Bruno also took in the sight of refugees from downwind of the blast at Bikini Atoll, miserable and burned and belatedly evacuated to Kwajalein. The skin on their heads, he recalled, "you could peel it like fried chicken skin."
In the standard histories, much of what happened that morning was "an accident." That's the term Edward Teller, the bomb's designer, uses in his memoir. The Navy said it had anticipated a six-megaton bomb, but Bravo came in at 15. It expected the winds to blow one way; they blew another. It had not evacuated downwinders in advance because the danger was deemed slight, and anyway the budget was tight. It had not expected that a Japanese fishing boat, the Lucky Dragon, would be trawling 87 miles from the blast. It had not expected that one of the fishermen would die.
Officially, the Atomic Energy Commission claimed that the Bravo shot had been "routine" and that among the evacuees "there were no burns. All were reported well." A month later, AEC Chairman Lewis Strauss told reporters that they were not only well but "happy" too. It is a simple matter to find government reports acknowledging the opposite now that that particular lie is unnecessary.
The Bravo blast, it is typically said, was equal to 1,000 Hiroshimas, as if that were comprehensible. The Hiroshima bomb instantly killed 80,000 people, more or less. Bravo had the power to incinerate 80 million: 10 New Yorks; 26,666 Twin Towers, more or less.
The "stem" of its mushroom cloud was 18 miles tall, its "cap" 62 miles across. That's a cloud five times the length of Manhattan, vaporizing all beneath it, sucking everything -- in Bravo's case, three islands' worth of coral reef, sand, land and sea life -- into the sky, and then showering it in a swirl of radioactive isotopes across an area now estimated at nearly 20,000 square miles.
