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Cover
The first large-scale thermonuclear
detonation—the 10.4-megaton Ivy Mike
test of 1 November 1952, at the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission Pacific Proving
Grounds on Eniwetok Atoll in the Marshall Islands. The test was designed to
confirm, at the megaton level, the effectiveness of the newly discovered
“Teller-Ulam” radiation “trigger,” an advance that made fusion
explosions practicable. The explosion was unexpectedly powerful, five hundred
times more so than the fission-technology Fat
Man of 1945. It left a crater 164 feet deep and 6,240 feet across where
the islet upon which the device rested had been, and it wrecked the unmanned
observation equipment on nearby islets. On islands miles away, where scientists
had intended to examine birds and trees, etc., to measure biological effects,
all animal and vegetable life was simply destroyed. Warships over thirty miles
out to sea endured searing heat. The mushroom cloud rose some forty thousand
feet and spread out over a hundred miles.
Ivy
Mike was not “bomb” but a test-bed; the Soviet
Union made the same breakthrough the next year. Successive tests were devoted to
developing serviceable thermonuclear weapons, or “hydrogen bombs,”
ultimately producing the vast arsenals that are the subject of this issues
themes—reductions in nuclear weapons. On page 13 begins an exchange of views
between Admiral Stansfield Turner, USN (Ret.), a former president of the Naval
War College, and two members of the colleges research faculty.