Adventures of a Sea Hunter_ In Search of Famous Shipwrecks - James P. Delgado [16]
My eyes are not drawn to the beauty of this tropical paradise, however. Abruptly, the rim of the atoll is interrupted by a dark blue hole. Nearly a mile across, it is the site of a vanished islet. It is also the site where in March 1954, the most powerful nuclear bomb ever was detonated on the surface of the earth by the United States. In an instant, an atomic bomb capable of incinerating an entire city vaporized the islet and cracked the reef. The pulverized coral and sand ejected by the 15-megaton blast traveled high up into the atmosphere, raining down as atomic fallout over thousands of square miles of ocean, nearby islands and ships at sea. Conducted in the name of science, the blast, code-named Castle Bravo, was a Cold War test of America’s new hydrogen bomb. It killed and sickened Pacific islanders, the crew of a Japanese fishing ironically named Lucky Dragon and left behind a horrific legacy.
Bikini is now a deadly place, its abandoned shores littered with rusting machinery and cables, its islands covered by thick concrete bunkers and regimented rows of decaying houses and replanted palm trees intended for the returning Bikinians, who are known as the “nuclear nomads” of the Pacific. Craters from nuclear blasts pock the bottom of Bikini’s lagoon. Inside the shallow dish of one of those craters rests the sunken fleet of Operation Crossroads. Like the debris on the islands and along the shores of the atoll, the sunken ships of Bikini are an archeological legacy of the beginning of the nuclear age. Our National Park Service team, about to land on the atoll, will be the first to survey this ghost fleet now that the radioactivity has diminished to a safe level. Looking down at the crater made by Castle Bravo, we all silently cross ourselves and wonder just what we will find and what other legacies may lurk in the water and the ships.
OPERATION CROSSROADS
Operation Crossroads was the result of months of inter-service rivalry and a postwar scramble to assess the military potentials and perils of the atomic bomb. The New York Herald Tribune, in a post-Hiroshima editorial, commented: “The victory or defeat of armies, the fate of nations, the rise and fall of empires are all alike, in any long perspective only the ripples on the surface of history; but the unpredictable unlocking of the inconceivable energy of the atom would stir history itself to its deepest depths.” Editorials suggesting that the advent of the atom bomb had forever changed warfare alarmed military officers, who did not like reading that “it should make an end of marching, rolling, and even flying armies, and turn most of our battleships into potential scrap.” The atomic tests at Bikini would test the truth of that argument.
The tests were appealing for more than technical reasons. They would demonstrate to the world, particularly the Soviet Union, the power and wealth of the United States. In April 1946, Admiral William H. Blandy, commander of the joint Army-Navy task force conducting the tests, told the nation in a live radio broadcast that the upcoming tests would “help us to be what the world expects our great, non-aggressive and peace-loving country to be — the leader of those nations which seek nothing but a just and lasting peace.” More bluntly, commentator Raymond Gram Swing stated that Operation Crossroads, “the first of the atomic era war games … is a notice served on the world that we have the power and intend to be heeded.”
The decision to use the atomic bomb test to destroy ships of the once-feared Imperial Japanese Navy would also emphasize America as the principal victor in the war. One newspaper account, accompanied by an Associated Press photograph of twenty-four battered-looking destroyers and submarines, crowed: “Trapped Remnants of Jap Fleet Face Destruction in United States Navy Atom-Bomb Tests.” The use of Japanese warships as atomic targets was a “symbolic killing” with the same weapon that