![]() ![]() In August 1945, Senator Brien McMahon, who within a year would write the Atomic Energy Act and organize and chair the Congressional Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, made the first public proposal for such a test, but one designed to demonstrate the vulnerability, rather than survivability, of ships. Farther in the background are a floating drydock and a merchant ship hulk. Ships from front to rear: USS Crittenden, Catron, Bracken, Burleson, Gilliam, Fallon, unknown ship, Fillmore, Kochab, Luna, and an unidentified tanker and Liberty ship. ![]() Prospective Operation Crossroads target ships and support ships at Pearl Harbor on February 27, 1946. The Strauss test would be designed to demonstrate ship survivability. A quarter century earlier, in 1921, the Navy had suffered a public relations disaster when General Billy Mitchell's bombers sank every target ship the Navy provided for the Project B ship-versus-bomb tests. After the end of the war, Lewis Strauss, future chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, proposed the testing of nuclear weapons on warships, stating to Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal that, "If such a test is not made, there will be loose talk to the effect that the fleet is obsolete in the face of this new weapon and this will militate against appropriations to preserve a postwar Navy of the size now planned." With very few bombs available, he suggested a large number of targets widely dispersed over a large area. Seaborg, the longest-serving chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, called Baker "the world's first nuclear disaster." Background ĭuring World War II, the United States had planned a series of nuclear strikes on Japanese naval bases in the Pacific, though these plans were scrapped in October 1944 following the destruction of the remaining Japanese fleet at the Battle of Leyte Gulf. The Baker test's radioactive contamination of all the target ships was the first case of immediate, concentrated radioactive fallout from a nuclear explosion. Planners attempted to protect participants in the Operation Crossroads tests against radiation sickness, but one study showed that the life expectancy of participants was reduced by an average of three months. ![]() Bikini remains uninhabited as of 2017, though it is occasionally visited by sport divers. In the 1950s, a series of large thermonuclear tests rendered Bikini unfit for subsistence farming and fishing because of radioactive contamination. Charlie was rescheduled as Operation Wigwam, a deep-water shot conducted in 1955 off the coast of Mexico (Baja California).īikini's native residents were evacuated from the island on board the LST-861, with most moving to the Rongerik Atoll. Ultimately, only nine target ships were able to be scrapped rather than scuttled. A third deep-water test named Charlie was planned for 1947 but was canceled primarily because of the United States Navy's inability to decontaminate the target ships after the Baker test. Radioactive sea spray caused extensive contamination. The bomb was known as Helen of Bikini and was detonated 90 feet (27 m) underwater on July 25, 1946. It detonated 520 feet (158 m) above the target fleet and caused less than the expected amount of ship damage because it missed its aim point by 2,130 feet (649 m). The bomb was named Gilda after Rita Hayworth's character in the 1946 film Gilda, and was dropped from the B-29 Superfortress Dave's Dream of the 509th Bombardment Group on July 1, 1946. A fleet of 95 target ships was assembled in Bikini Lagoon and hit with two detonations of Fat Man plutonium implosion-type nuclear weapons of the kind dropped on Nagasaki in 1945, each with a yield of 23 kilotons of TNT (96 TJ). Blandy rather than by the Manhattan Project, which had developed nuclear weapons during World War II. They were conducted by Joint Army/Navy Task Force One, headed by Vice Admiral William H. The Crossroads tests were the first of many nuclear tests held in the Marshall Islands, and the first to be publicly announced beforehand and observed by an invited audience, including a large press corps. The purpose of the tests was to investigate the effect of nuclear weapons on warships. They were the first nuclear weapon tests since Trinity on July 16, 1945, and the first detonations of nuclear devices since the atomic bombing of Nagasaki on August 9, 1945. Operation Crossroads was a pair of nuclear weapon tests conducted by the United States at Bikini Atoll in mid-1946.
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