By John C. Abell
1956: The United States proves it can deliver a hydrogen bomb from the air — by dropping one on the small island group known as the Bikini Atoll. The B-52 bomber crew misses its target by a mile (well, 4 miles, actually) but the point is made: Nobody is safe from the most fearsome weapon ever designed by humans.
And we don’t mean the itsy-bitsy, teeny-weeny two-piece bathing suit first worn by the native women of this Pacific Islands paradise, albeit a deadly weapon in its own right.
It seems inconceivable now, but there was a time when hydrogen bombs were routinely tested right out in the open — monstrously menacing mushroom clouds, radioactive shroud and all. After a while tests were driven underground and, under a series of treaties which began in 1963, testing was banned almost entirely.
But in 1946, when U.S. nuclear bomb testing began in what was called Operation Crossroads in this remote Pacific location, memories were still fresh of the atomic bomb attacks on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki which effectively ended World War II. The end of the war also ended the convenient alliance between the United States and the Soviet Union, the world’s only superpowers, whose faceoff in the Cold War would define geopolitics for the next half century.
The peace was kept largely by the unthinkable prospect of global thermonuclear war. The visceral fear everyone should have of these apocalyptic weapons was flamed by public tests which left no doubt that a nation who had them possessed unspeakable power. And, indeed, no H-bomb has ever been launched in anger. >>>
