Tests
The first atomic bomb to be detonated at Bikini was code-named "Able", a bomb similar in most respects to "Fat Man," which was dropped on Nagasaki. The B-29 designated to drop Able was named "Dave's Dream," and on July 1, 1946, at about 8:45 AM, the first peacetime detonation of a nuclear ordnance occurred. Of the animals left on board the ships at anchor in Bikini Lagoon, approximately 10% died instantly. The Naval vessels managed to withstand the blast for the most part, but many were destroyed during Test "Baker" on July 25. In the coming years, some twenty additional bomb tests would be conducted before the United States government officially returned control of the islands over to their natives in 1957. The largest test, Castle Bravo, also proved to be a large radiation fallout disaster: ashes from the explosion flew miles into inhabited islands, putting nuclear fallout into the public minds of many. The 1 March 1954 test exposed a Japanese fishing boat, Daigo Fukuryū Maru, to radioactive fallout, resulting in 11 of the boat's 23 crewmembers dying from radiation sickness.
Read more about this topic: Bikini Atomic Experiments
Famous quotes containing the word tests:
“It is not the literal past that rules us, save, possibly, in a biological sense. It is images of the past.... Each new historical era mirrors itself in the picture and active mythology of its past or of a past borrowed from other cultures. It tests its sense of identity, of regress or new achievement against that past.”
—George Steiner (b. 1929)
“Although she feeds me bread of bitterness,
And sinks into my throat her tiger’s tooth,
Stealing my breath of life, I will confess
I love this cultured hell that tests my youth!”
—Claude McKay (1889–1948)
“One of the tests of the civilization of people is the treatment of its criminals.”
—Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)