“One of a series of tests had been conducted by the military in the summer of 1946. Called Operation Crossroads, it took place at Bikini Atoll, a coral formation roughly circular, twenty-five miles in diameter, located in the Marshall Islands, twenty-seven hundred miles southwest of Hawaii and two hundred miles north of Kwajalein. The inhabitants of Bikini were moved to Rongerik Atoll, 130 miles away, to become wards of the American government.”
“The purported purpose of the tests was to determine the ability of naval vessels to survive an atomic attack, but I (the author of the book) think the real purpose was to convince senior military, particularly the Navy, personnel that the bomb was not just another piece of ordinance. The tests were poorly conceived and inexpertly executed. Some of the ninety Japanese and outdated U.S. warships, including battleships, aircraft carriers, and submarines and landing craft, were anchored in the lagoon.”
“They were conducted during the height of debate in the United Nations about the Baruch plan and provided beautiful propaganda fodder for the Soviets.”
“On the first test, an error in the operation of the radio-controlled timing system prevented crucial instrumentation … from operating until fifteen seconds after the device had detonated.”
“The second bomb, according to the Civilian Evaluation Commission created by Truman, ’caused a deluge of water loaded with deadly radioactive elements over an area that embraced ninety percent of the target array. All but a few of the target ships were drenched with radioactive seawater and all within the zone of evident damage are unsafe to board.’ This was the first indication to the military of the problems caused by radioactivity. The ships were still afloat but uninhabitable. The contamination was so great that a scheduled third test had to be canceled.”
Source: Nuclear Hostages, by Bernard J. O’Keefe, Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston, 1983, pages 135-136.
“Three weeks later, however the second experiment, Test Baker …the bomb was exploded underwater, almost directly beneath the target ships. This did three things: it immediately sank several huge ships and tossed a battleship into the air; the mushroom cloud, fed by foam and water, formed a stupendous cap three miles across … and much of the moisture in the cloud fell back to sea, coating the fleet with a frightful layer of radioactivity.”
“After eleven days had passed and many of the target ships were still too hot with radiation to board, the admiral who commanded the tests declared: ‘This is a form of poison warfare.'”
“Perhaps the ultimate distortion at Bikini was that no humans died during the tests (although many U.S. servicemen were exposed to harmful levels of radiation and likely suffered ill effects later).”
Source: Hiroshima in America, Fifty Years of Denial, by Robert Jay Lifton and Greg Mitchell, G.P. Putnam’s and Sons, New York, 1995, page 85-86.
(COMMENT: Just supplemental information regarding the Operations Crossroads experiments on Bikini Atoll that I had blogged about previously. In all my blogs all italicized, bold and underlined words are emphasis that I put in).
Published: March 29, 2019
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