Perfecting the H-Bomb
In the northern section of Eniwetok Atoll, on the island of Elugelab, the U.S. constructed a large laboratory
building in 1952.10 Placed in the lab was a bulky mechanism nicknamed Mike that included fission weaponry and
deuterium frozen into liquid form. The cylindrical apparatus was twenty-two feet long, with a diameter of five and a
half feet, weighing a total of twenty-one tons. On the first day of November 1952 the laboratory’s contents exploded
with a force of over ten megatons—nearly one thousand times more powerful than the atomic bomb dropped on
Hiroshima. With the blast, proof existed that a hydrogen bomb was within reach. U.S. Government records listed
Mike as the first detonated "experimental thermonuclear device."11 The island on which it was situated disappeared.
The experience "so unnerved Norris Bradbury, the Los Alamos director," said a later narrative of the Mike
explosion, "that for a brief time he wondered if the people at Eniwetok should somehow try to conceal from their
colleagues back in New Mexico [at Los Alamos] the magnitude of what had happened."12
With the gigantic hydrogen explosions in the Pacific Ocean the fledgling Lawrence Livermore Laboratory in
California was gaining great importance—as was one of its prime movers, Edward Teller. Fellow physicist J. Robert
Oppenheimer, an opponent of H-bomb development and a rival of Teller’s, came under growing attack.
America was at an apex of the cold war. The arms race between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, and the fears of
internal subversion fomented by McCarthyism, made the AEC less prone than ever to tolerate dissension within its
own ranks. That repressive atmosphere intensified in April 1953, when President Eisenhower signed an executive
order launching an unprecedented far-reaching investigation into the "loyalty" of federal employees.13 Two months
later, with great fanfare, the government executed Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, convicted as spies who had conspired
to give American atomic secrets to the Soviets.14
In 1954 the AEC held hearings on the matter of Robert Oppenheimer’s security clearance. Oppenheimer’s
consultancy with the AEC was soon to expire, but this didn’t prevent the AEC chairman, Lewis Strauss, from
carrying on what many scientists considered a "witch hunt" against him.15 On the basis of information supplied by
the FBI, Oppenheimer was accused of guilt by association because of his long-known early contacts with Communist
Party members in the 1930s.
A two-year-old statement to the FBI by Teller, questioning Oppenheimer’s loyalty and character, had a major
influence on the hearings. Teller, although not openly attacking Oppenheimer’s loyalty, cited his opposition to
development of the H-bomb—implying that Oppenheimer had a "defect" in his personality.16 The AEC then filed a
report stripping Oppenheimer of his security clearance. Chairman Strauss wrote the majority report echoing Teller’s
charge that Oppenheimer had "fundamental defects" in his character.17
The same year that Oppenheimer was purged from the AEC, America’s nuclear weapons testers returned to the
Marshall Islands with hydrogen explosives portable enough to qualify as bona fide bombs. From February to May
six varieties of hydrogen bombs were detonated during "Operation Castle."18 The first and largest, code-named
Bravo, was fifteen megatons.
The American troops participating in Operation Castle were the first to get a close look at the H-bomb in action.
Marv Hyman was aboard the U.S.S. Curtis on March 1, 1954, when the Bravo shot inaugurated the hydrogen
bomb. The ship’s crew was kept below decks for three days as Bravo’s fallout fell, Hyman recalled in 1980. "We
were so well-indoctrinated, we were told not to say anything," recollected Hyman. But Navy denials did not change
what had occurred. "I don’t know how far away we were—they never told us. There was no way to get out of the
fallout when the wind came right back at us. They set up a sprinkler system on deck."19 Seawater was used.
"For three or four days we weren’t allowed outside. They closed all the ports and hatches. Then they said it was
‘low enough’ to go out. They let us go on the islands in the Eniwetok and Bikini atolls and go swimming. I saw
dead sea life all over, floating around by the millions." Later, sailing into San Francisco, the U.S.S. Curtis remained
radioactive, Hyman said. "They wouldn’t let us off the ship for three days."20
Navy seaman Robert Smith was twenty-three years old when he arrived at Bikini Island for Operation Castle.
"We did not know nuclear weapons tests had already been conducted in this area. We even went swimming there,"
Smith recalled in 1979 from his home in Del, Oklahoma. "At the time, most of us did not even know what an Hbomb
was."21
10. For a revealing planning document for the 1952 hydrogen tests at Eniwetok, see "Thermonuclear Research at the University of California Radiation
Laboratory," Director of Military Application, AEC 425/20, Washington, D.C., June 13,1952; quoted in York, The Advisors, p. 82.
11. Announced US Nuclear Tests, p. 6.
12. McPhee, Curve of Binding Energy, p. 77. A key American designer of nuclear warheads, Theodore Taylor, later mused: "The theorist’s world is a world of
the best people and the worst of possible results." (McPhee, Curve of Binding Energy, p. 87.)
13. Douglas T. Miller and Marion Nowak, The Fifties: The Way We Really Were (New York: Doubleday, 1977), p. 405.
14. For accounts of the Rosenberg case that challenge the government’s charges, see Walter Schneir and Miriam Schneir, Invitation to an Inquest (New York:
Doubleday, 1965); Robert and Michael Meeropol, We Are Your Sons (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1975).
15. Carolyn Kopp, "The Origins of the American Scientific Debate over Fallout Hazards," Social Studies of Science (1979): 411 (hereafter cited as "Debate over
Fallout Hazards").
16. P. M. Stern, The Oppenheimer Case: Security on Trial (New York: Harper & Row, 1969). See also D. J. Keveles, The Physicists (New York: Knopf,
1978), pp. 380-382.
17. Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, September 1954, pp. 275-277.
18. More than a quarter century after Operation Castle there were indications that the U.S. Government was not unreservedly proud of it. When, in cooperation
with the nation’s nuclear weapons design labs, the Department of Energy published an official list of American nuclear tests through the end of 1979, the
listing of Operation Castle omitted "yield range" for four of the test series’ six hydrogen blasts. The omissions occurred for hydrogen weapons tests codenamed
Romeo, Union, Yankee, and Nectar—which exploded at a combined power of over thirty-two megatons, according to a U.S. Government report
declassified at the end of 1972. See Announced US Nuclear Tests, in comparison to "Joint Force Seven" cited in York, The Advisors, p. 86.
19. Arizona Daily Star, April 13, 1980.
20. Ibid.
21. Atomic Veterans’ Newsletter, November/December 1979, p. 7