Underwater atomic bomb detonation at Bikini Atoll - GIF

[ToolTalkBot]

Underwater atomic bomb detonation at Bikini Atoll.

[Frank S]

With a blast force as great as that apparently was why did the surface of the water remain pristine calm?

[BuffaloJohn]

With a blast force as great as that apparently was why did the surface of the water remain pristine calm?

Much of the initial force was up, that was not calm. Then there was a shock wave that radiated, that was not calm.

With the view being from pretty far away, you just can't see the water fluctuations. Think about it - those are fairly large ships (likely WWII ones - for reference a Fletcher Class destroyer built in 1939 was 370ft long) - obviously put there to test what happens when such a bomb goes off. If the ship is hundreds of feet long, you wouldn't see 20 ft waves or anything like that...

[Frank S]

In February 1946, Commodore Ben H. Wyatt, military governor of the Marshall Islands, went to Bikini Atoll and met with an assembly of residents to break the news that they had to leave, at least temporarily. According to Jack Niedenthal’s 2001 history of the Bikini Atoll, For the Good of Mankind, Wyatt told them the tests were necessary to prevent future wars. The residents reacted with confusion and sadness. Finally, their leader, King Juda, stood up and announced, We will go, believing that everything is in the hands of God.”

The small atoll would soon become one of the most famous places on the planet, such a recognizable name that a French designer named a swimsuit after it. Between 1946 and 1958, the United States detonated 23 nuclear devices at Bikini Atoll, including 20 hydrogen bombs. Among those was the March 1, 1954 Castle Bravo H-bomb test, which reached a yield of 15 megatons, 1,000 times more powerful than the atomic bomb that destroyed Nagasaki in 1945.

Here are some seven facts about the nuclear tests at Bikini Atoll.

1. The First Atomic bomb dropped at Bikini Atoll Missed the Target

Bettmann Archive/Getty Images

A mushroom cloud seen from Eneu Island, resulting from an atomic explosion of “Able” during Operation Crossroads, July 1, 1946.

The atoll was picked as the location for Operation Crossroads, a program to investigate the effects of nuclear blasts on Navy vessels. On July 1, 1946, Test Able was staged. A target fleet of 95 ships was positioned in Bikini Atoll’s lagoon, with laboratory animals—pigs, goats and mice—on board so that scientists could study the potential effects of radiation on ship crews. A support fleet of another 150 ships withdrew to a position 10 nautical miles from the Atoll, and waited.

At 9 a.m., a B-29 bomber flew over the lagoon and dropped an atomic bomb, which exploded 520 feet from the surface and missed the target ship in the middle of the lagoon by 1,500 to 2,000 feet, according to an account from the Atomic Heritage Foundation. The bomb only sunk five of the ships, but the force of the blast and radiation killed about a third of the lab animals.

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2. The Second Atomic Bomb Test at Bikini Atoll Created a Tsunami

Galerie Bilderwelt/Getty Images

The Baker test during Operation Crossroads, a series of two nuclear weapons tests conducted by the United States at Bikini Atoll.

In Test Baker on July 25, 1946, the U.S. military tried a different approach, exploding a bomb 90 feet beneath the water surface of the lagoon. It was the first underwater test of a nuclear weapon, and resulted in all sorts of startling phenomena, according to the Atomic Heritage Foundation. The blast generated a massive bubble of hot gas that simultaneously expanded downward and upward.

At the bottom, it carved a 30-foot-deep, 2,000-foot-wide crater in the surface of the sea floor. On the surface, it burst through like a geyser and created an enormous dome of water that eventually reached more than a mile in height. The blast triggered a tsunami with a 94-foot-high wave, so powerful that it lifted up the Arkansas, a 27,000-ton ship. The surge of water swept over many of the target ships, coating them with radioactivity. Eight of the ships were sunk, according to a U.S. Navy account.

3. The Soviets Watched the Tests, But Weren’t Impressed

The U.S. allowed international observers at the tests, and Lavrentiy Pavlovich Beria, who was both head of the Soviet atomic program and chief of the Stalin regime’s secret police, sent a physicist and a geologist, according to Richard Rhodes’ 1995 book Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb.

Apparently, they weren’t impressed. One of the observers Simon Peter Alexandrov, who was in charge of uranium for the Soviet’s own nuclear effort, told a U.S. scientist there that if the purpose of the test was to frighten the Soviets, it hadn’t worked, because the Soviets had bombers that could reach U.S. cities, according to the National Security Archive. The Soviet newspaper Pravda subsequently criticized the U.S. tests as common blackmail” and said that other than a few obsolete warships, the only thing the United States had blown up was belief in the seriousness of American talk about atomic disarmament.”
Full story at https://www.lankaweb.com/news/items/...ather-warfare/

[Floradawg]

I read the book "Dark Sun".

One thing I have always wondered is how much marine life was destroyed or injured from the concussive forces which can be transmitted through water considerable distances.